A four-way distinction in English definite expressions

Abstract

Analyses of pronouns, definite descriptions, and demonstratives range from treating them to be independent of each other to treating them with parallel semantics. In this paper, I compare the semantic contribution of different building blocks of these expressions and propose to delineate the semantic space of definite descriptions along two dimensions: between the form of the content (pronominal vs. description) and the mechanism of reference (anaphoric vs. deictic). To support this, I provide two pieces of evidence. First, I show that deictic and anaphoric pronouns have distinct semantic and distributional properties. Second, I show that the NP content of a definite description makes the same semantic contribution as the gender inference of a pronoun.