Semantic vs. pragmatic definites: Evidence for presupposition cost from sentence processing

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of definiteness and the number and types of definite entities (e.g. Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950; Hawkins, 1978; Löbner, 1985; and many others). Definite noun phrases (NPs) include definite descriptions, demonstratives, pronouns, possessive constructions, proper names, or NPs with a universal quantifier as determiner, and research has focused on which properties are shared by these entities and how they differ from one another. Researchers have for instance been arguing over whether proper names and definite descriptions share the same features (e.g. Geurts, 1997) or whether they are fundamentally different (e.g. Kripke, 1972).