Weak definites as a form of definiteness: experimental investigations

Abstract

Deinite noun phrases typically refer to entities that are uniquely identiiable in the speaker and addressee's common ground. However, some deinite noun phrases (e.g. the hospital in Mary had to go the hospital and John did too) seem to violate uniqueness. We discuss a series of experiments that seek to understand some of the properties of this class of deinites. We consider most carefully the hypothesis that these "weak deinite" interpretations arise in implicitly "incorporated" constructions, attempting to provide a sketch of this hypothesis' motivation and potential consequences. In our experiments we found that compared to regular deinites, the weak deinites need not refer uniquely, and readily trigger semantically enriched readings that compete effectively with normal inferences one might draw from a sentence. Perhaps the most surprising inding in the experiments is that nouns that could occur as weak deinites, also seemed to retain some of these "weak" properties even when expressed as indeinites. We try and make sense of this within the "incorporation" framework.

A Dual-Process Activation Model: Processing definiteness and information status

“…a complex functional structure that itself can be filled with individual referents (cf. Zwarts 2014), similar to weak referential items that are introduced by bare nouns and weak definites (Carlson et al 2013). In other words, when a noun phrase is encountered that can be linked to a previously activated concept and its designated set, the definite article uniquely identifies one element, i.e.…”

A Corpus Data of Weak Definites in Brazilian Portuguese

“…This generic definite, illustrated by the radio in (3) is productive in BP as well as in English. The analysis in Carlson et al (2013) is ultimately difficult to distinguish from Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts', but the authors emphasize a different focus on their investigation. They defend that the most important aspect 9 The cursory review presented here does not contemplate other possible explanations, for example, , which suggests that weak definites are always types and never tokens.…”

“…They state weak definites and generic definites would be "different faces of same phenomenon" (2011:15). Unlike Schwarz (2012) and Carlson et al (2013), Aguilar-Guevara and Zwarts declare that the noun denotes kind, not only the incorporated VP…”

“…The auditorium in (2) is uniquely identifiable and therefore different instances of the same expression in that context necessarily point to the same referent. Carlson and Sussman (2005) proposed that cases that lack the uniqueness property, such as (1) (Carlson and Sussman, 2005;Carlson et al, 2006;Carlson et al, 2013) is that they are lexically restricted. Even within the same construction (e.g.…”

“…As the authors claim (2013:14), "Weak definites are further restricted by the need to co-occur with, or be "governed by," certain other lexical items -verbs and prepositions". Those characteristics and some other experimental data (Carlson et al, 2013;Klein et al; led the authors to propose an "incorporation" analysis, in which the noun itself lacks the uniqueness, while providing a notion of "(cultural) familiarity" , or an enriched interpretation (presented by Goldberg, 1995). The fact that weak definites generally present semantic enrichment is an important argument used by Carlson et al (2013) to support the "incorporation" analysis.…”