Speciicity, Automatic Designation, And`i'

In its most common linguistic use speci city refers to a kind of de niteness This is expressed by the grammatical marking on an NP showing that the speaker knows the identity of the referent Thus a police chief has presum ably a particular Colombian in mind when he utters My agents cannot wait to interrogate the Colombian While the above explanation seems straightforward speci city has come to be known as a subtle notion There have been a variety of suggestions as to its meaning thanks to the considerable output produced in the seventies and early eighties in the semantics of speci city but a uniform de nition of the term has not been agreed upon Similarly the relation between speci city and de niteness is one that is discernible though what exactly this relation consists of has been a topic of controversy A common practice is to describe this elusive relation on a scale based on identi ability by speaker and hearer as illustrated in Table Attributed to Talmy Giv on the table originally omitted a de nite non speci c interpretation which we have added as the second column This paper studies the context dependence of the rst person indexical I while attempting to make the identi ability criteria for speci city and