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Peter Frederick Strawson (1950) brings Russell's observations to further empirical analysis setting out a more pragmatic-centered account of definite descriptions.According to Russell, for a sentence like (4) The floor is strewn with petals to be true, there must be only one floor designated by the definite description the floor.Strawson, however, detects uses of the-definite descriptions like that in (4) referring to wider categories of objects, often in a somewhat vague manner. Consider (5)(5) The dolphin is one of the most intelligent animals on earthThe definite description the dolphin does not indicate a single specimen of dolphin but rather all specimens that, by virtue of their intensional features, can be included within this category. He points out that the meaning of definite descriptions like those in ( 4) and ( 5) is incomplete, if exclusively analyzed at the semantic level. What delineates the reference expressed by the floor in ( 4) is the speaker's intention to refer to a particular floor, possibly identifiable by both speaker and hearer. (The title he chooses, On referring, in contrast to Russell's On denoting, is suggestive of this more speakeroriented interpretation of definite descriptions. Indeed, as Donnellan will state, -Expressions denote, people refer‖, cf. also Cohen 2008: 2.) So, behind the use of a definite description, there is also the speaker's instruction to treat some referent as spatio-temporally identifiable for the hearer.Contention on referring properties of definite descriptions -and therefore of existence presuppositions -became even hazier with Keith Donnellan's (1966) bipartite distinction between ATTRIBUTIVE and REFERENTIAL definite NPs. In Donnellan's account, speakers can use definite descriptions either to presuppose the existence of a referent or with no particular referent in mind. In his popular example (6) Smith's murderer is insane the definite description Smith"s murderer can be uttered attributively, i.e. with reference to any individual who committed the crime, whatever his/her identity, or referentially,

This work tackles the evidential behavior of presuppositions and assertions by assessing their socio-interactional function in communication. It is argued that by asserting and presupposing contents in an utterance, speakers encode a personal experience and a factual type of evidentiality, respectively, the former entailing a stronger involvement of the speaker as committed source of some information. By discussing how evidential meanings can also be pragmatically-inferred, the present paper proposes to recast the presupposition-assertion distinction as a further level of evidentiality marking.

Indirect speech is a remarkable trait of human communication. The present paper tackles the sociobiological underpinnings of communicative indirectness discussing both socio-interactional and cognitive rationales behind its manifestation in discourse. From a social perspective, the use of indirect forms in interactions can be regarded as an adaptive response to the epistemic implications of transacted new information in small primary groups, representing – in Givón’s terms – our “bio-cultural” descent. The design features of indirect strategies today may therefore be explained in terms of a form-function mapping in which indirect communicative expressions allowed a “safer” transaction of contents and a more cooperative attitude of speakers in both face-to-face and public contexts of communication. The unchallengeability effects notably induced by underencoded meanings have now received extensive experimental backing, unveiling intriguing underlying cognitive mechanisms such as the well-known cognitive illusions or fallacies.