The interpretative options of anaphoric complex demonstratives

How Mutual Knowledge Constrains the Choice of Anaphoric Demonstratives in Japanese and English

It has been widely acknowledged that the choice of Japanese demonstratives (the distal a-series, the medial so-series, and the proximal ko-series) in their anaphoric use is regulated by the rules concerned with the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent. In crosslinguistic discussions of anaphoric demonstratives, on the other hand, the effect of the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent ha...

On the relation between coherence relations and anaphoric demonstratives in German

Recent research suggests that pronoun interpretation is guided by the semantic coherence relations between clauses. However, it is not yet wellunderstood whether coherence effects extend to other anaphoric expressions beyond pronouns. We report an experiment on German, a language in which human antecedents can be referred to both with personal and demonstrative pronouns. How do anaphoric demons...

Syntactically Complex Demonstratives and Sortal Inherency

Two problems related to the analysis of noun phrases in which demonstratives occur are discussed: (1) it is shown that there exists an infinite number of syntactically complex demonstrative noun phrases and thus an infinite number of noun phrases which are neither purely referential not purely quantificational, (2) some problems concerning the semantic role of the common noun to which demonstra...

Complex demonstratives as quantifiers: objections and replies

In ‘‘Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account’’ (MIT Press 2001) (henceforth CD), I argued that complex demonstratives are quantifiers. Many philosophers had held that demonstratives, both simple and complex, are referring terms. Since the publication of CD various objections to the account of complex demonstratives I defended in it have been raised. In the present work, I lay out the...

Reference and Ambiguity in Complex Demonstratives