Demonstratives, definite descriptions and non-redundancy

Demonstratives, Definite Descriptions and Definiteness∗

Kaplan (1989) showed us that demonstratives are special for two reasons. First, they are connected to the context: the “canonical” uses of demonstratives (to adopt Roberts’s (2002) terminology) are associated with demonstrations, extralinguistic acts that determine the reference. Second, they’re a particularly clear case of constituents with what Kaplan calls “prepropositional” content – that i...

Incomplete Definite Descriptions, Demonstrative Completion and Redundancy

“Incomplete” definite descriptions (i.e. descriptions that violate the uniqueness constraint) have been offered various accounts in semantics. Among them, the so-called ellipsis account, which analyzes “the F” as elliptical for “the F which is that F”. I begin by arguing that the objections raised against this account have not been conclusive, and go on to supply a new argument against it, whic...

Generating Definite Descriptions Non-Incrementality, Inference, and Data

Generating Minimal Definite Descriptions

The incremental algorithm introduced in (Dale and Reiter, 1995) for producing distinguishing descriptions does not always generate a minimal description. In this paper, I show that when generalised to sets of individuals and disjunctive properties, this approach might generate unnecessarily long and ambiguous and/or epistemically redundant descriptions. I then present an alternative, constraint...

Definite Descriptions and Semantic Memory

Subjects were exposed to sentences containing "direct" and "indirect" uses of names and definite descriptions. On a subsequent recognition test incorrect rejections tended to be of sentences involving indirect uses, and false alarms to sentences involving direct uses. This finding is contrary to the predictions of models that suggest indiscriminate substitution of names for descriptions, as do ...