A Review of the Linguistic Research on Definite Descriptions

We present in this paper a review on the linguistic literature on the types of uses of definite descriptions (noun phrases with the definite article the). Definite descriptions have been studied extensively by linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computational linguists. The theories discussed in this paper help us to understand the problem of interpreting definite descriptions. We look at research studying the various ways in which definite descriptions relate to their antecedents and/or to the context. We compare terms referring to the various types of uses of definite descriptions by presenting tables that relate examples of definite description use to different terminology, according to different authors.