The Asymmetries between the Definite Article and Demonstratives: a Procedural Account

There is a well known tradition in the literature on definite Determiner Phrases (DPs) that concentrates on the asymmetries in the distribution and the anaphoric properties of determiners such as articles and demonstratives. A huge amount of work on the topic has been done on French by linguists like Kleiber, Corblin, Marandin, Maes, Apothéloz, Reichler-Béguelin or De Mulder, and on English by Hawkins, Cornish or Gundel. I will rely essentially on this research tradition, as well as on some version of Accessibility Theory (Ariel (1990), Gundel et al. (1993)). The aim of my talk is to show that the same semantic notions we invoke to explain the deictic and discourse anaphoric properties of definite DPs are enough to account for the constraints on the distribution of determiners and noun modifiers inside DPs. In this way, a unified account can be provided for the asymmetries between definite articles and demonstratives both inside DPs and in the discourse domain.