Description:

David Beaver will join us from the University of Texas at Austin to present "Definiteness, Determinacy, Novelty and Familiarity." Abstract below:

In modern times the distinction between definite and indefinite noun phrases came to prominence when Russell (1905) proposed that both definite and indefinite descriptions introduce quantifiers, opposing the Fregean position according to which indefinite descriptions are quantifiers, but definite descriptions are terms. Later, theories emerged explaining the difference between definite and indefinite phrases: indefinites signal ‘novelty’ and definites ‘familiarity’ (Christopherson 1939, Heim 1982). My challenge will be to explain how they can all be right.

The tension between uniqueness and familiarity-based accounts remains in current literature. And there is yet another tension: the bulk of semantic work on definiteness does little to help us understand the immense variation in definiteness marking found cross-linguistically, such that many languages either have definite articles but no indefinites (98 languages), have indefinites but no definites (45), or generally lack articles expressing definiteness (198).

I will introduce introduce a new approach to resolving some of these tensions based on recent joint work with Elizabeth Coppock (L&P 38:5, 2015, and Pre-proceedings of the Ams. Colloq. 2015), suggesting how familiarity is related to uniqueness, and how a uniform model can account not only for languages which consistently express definiteness (e.g. English or French), but also for languages that don’t (e.g. Russian, Korean, Urdu, or Latin).