Demonstrative descriptions and anti-uniqueness

Abstract

Demonstrative descriptions robustly give rise to an anti-uniqueness inference, rendering them infelicitous with inherently unique nouns. Two major theoretical approaches have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. One posits that demonstratives lexically encode an anti-uniqueness presupposition in their semantics (Nowak, 2019; Dayal and Jiang, 2022; Owusu, 2022), while the other derives the inference from general pragmatic principles (Blumberg, 2020; Ahn, 2022, 2023). In this paper, I present evidence in favor of the presuppositional account and introduce a modalized implementation that addresses key limitations of prior proposals. Drawing on cross-linguistic empirical data, I further demonstrate that the anti-uniqueness approach is better suited to account for typological variation in this domain.