A, The, Another: A Game of Same and Different

Abstract

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the level of descriptive content, they are pressured from two sides: definites expressing identity and another phrases expressing difference, and Gricean reasoning predicts that indefinites signal both difference and identity and are infelicitous when definites and another phrases are felicitous. However, occasionally a space opens between the and another , for a to fill. This is in part due to conditions handicapping the or another semantically, in part to another 's phonological handicap. The division of labor between determiners in the field of difference and sameness is thus the result of an intricate competition. We model this competition in a version of game-theoretic pragmatics.

Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts

“…On the other hand, interpreting it as introducing a second, novel T-Rex would, first, make the text segment rather incoherent. Second, as shown by Grønn & Saebø (2012), replacing a by another is almost obligatory or at least strongly preferred in such cases. In (20) the (again slightly simplified) denotation of the main clause in the third sentence in (19) is given:…”

“…In the case of (11), the indefinite a T-Rex can only be understood as introducing a novel T-Rex that is distinct from the one referred to by the definite description in the first sentence. In fact, the sentence sounds slightly marked in the context of the first sentence and requires another instead of a to be fully acceptable (see Grønn & Saebø 2012). In the case of (12), in contrast, the indefinite is not understood as introducing a novel T-Rex, but rather as picking up the T-Rex referred to by the definite description in the first sentence.…”

Latin UNUS and the discourse properties of unity cardinals

“…I will argue that unity cardinals trigger antipresuppositions (also known as implicated presuppositions, see Percus 2006, Sauerland 2008, extending in particular the ideas of Grønn and Saebø (2012) and Amsili and Beyssade (2016). I will argue that generally, projective content is a promising way of making sense of the discursive behaviour of these forms.…”

“…In section 3, I propose a formal semantic analysis of unity cardinals, and also provide an account of how their distribution is impacted by their potential alternatives (bare nouns in Latin, the indefinite article in English), based on previous work by Grønn and Saebø (2012). The aim of this section is to drive home the idea that the distribution of a linguistic item does not only depend on its intrinsic meaning and properties, but also on the meanings and properties of alternatives a speaker might choose.…”

Reasoning about definiteness in a language without articles

“…Many of these accounts (e.g., Heim 1991;Grønn & Saebø 2012;Horn & Abbott 2013) assume that pairs of alternative utterances like (1-2) are generated by conventionalized scales of lexical alternatives, in this case, a scale consisting of the articles a and the. From a cross-linguistic perspective, many languages lack articles like a and the, but are nevertheless able to signal definiteness via other morphosyntactic mechanisms.…”