'Mario hat gesagt, der und der hätte das und das gemacht': On a Weird Determiner in German

Abstract

This paper investigates a special kind of DP in German that has not been discussed in the linguistic literature so far, namely DPs with doubled definite determiners (we call them ’DD-DPs’ in the following for doubled definite DPs). We argue that they are non-referential expressions that not only constrain the current discourse model in which they can be used felicitously, but also a related speech context. In particular, we suggest that DD-DPs presuppose the existence of a speech act other than the current one, and that a definite or name must be used in the presupposed conversation.