The most descriptive depiction

Abstract

Deixis and depiction are commonly taken to be incompatible with the composition of descriptive grammatical content. In this paper, we present uses of demonstratives that allow deictic and depictive information to enter descriptive content in a principled way. Specifically, we show that even exophoric demonstratives that take rigid and iconic information can refer at the kind-level. We argue that the derivation of kind reference is different between deictic demonstratives and depictive demonstratives: in the former, a relevant subkind is identified from an object-level entity, while in the latter, the depictive information directly composes with the noun and forms a kind without the intermediate reference to an entity. This analysis has implications on the semantic analysis of demonstratives and highlights the ability of demonstratives to mediate between different modalities of language.