Weak Definite Noun Phrases

Semantic accounts of the definite article have tended to fall into two general classes: ‘uniqueness’ accounts (Russell, 1905), and ‘familiarity’ accounts (Heim, 1982; see also Abbott, 2004, inter alia). It is also generally known that there are instances of definite descriptions that are resistant to such analyses, and are difficult to subsume under either treatment, or even a combination of both. Birner and Ward (1994), Poesio (1994), and Barker (in press) explicitly deal with what we are going to call “weak” interpretations of certain definite NP’s. Roberts (2003) is just one recent example of an attempt to integrate instances of this sort into a more general account.