The English past tense as a definite description

There are two major groups of analyses in the literature on English past tense; existential semantics with domain restriction, and pronominal (i.e. anaphoric) analysis. In this paper, I discuss a group data difficult for both these analyses: obligatory use some contexts without any salient antecedent, such as asking Who built church when pointing at (Kratzer 1998). The analysis predicts that tense should be infelicitous, while restriction cannot account distribution data. argue observations follow from lexical ambiguity between an anaphoric uniqueness reading, parallel to similar patterns definites (Schwarz 2009: a.o.).