Definite Descriptions in Intuitionist Positive Free Logic

Acquiring maximality in free relatives and definite descriptions

Processing definite descriptions in corpora

We discuss in this paper a system that resolves definite descriptions in written texts. A preliminary study of definite descriptions in a collection of 20 texts revealed that about 30% of the 1040 definites in the collection were cases of anaphoric definites whose antecedents had the same head noun, and 50% introduced novel discourse referents. An algorithm which resolves anaphoric definite des...

Generating Minimal Definite Descriptions

The incremental algorithm introduced in (Dale and Reiter, 1995) for producing distinguishing descriptions does not always generate a minimal description. In this paper, I show that when generalised to sets of individuals and disjunctive properties, this approach might generate unnecessarily long and ambiguous and/or epistemically redundant descriptions. I then present an alternative, constraint...

. Definite Descriptions (original Proposal)

What happens when the description is improper? A description νΦ is proper if there is exactly-one entity such that Φ [in the relevant situation]; otherwise, it is improper. We propose to treat improper descriptions as non-starters, which vitiate every expression in which they appear. In particular, an improper description is null [i.e., denotes nothing], and every expression in which it appears...

(De)accenting Definite Descriptions

In this paper it is shown that a definite description refers to a given discourse referent if the descriptive content is deaccented. But if there is an accent on the descriptive content, a novel referent is introduced. Starting from a uniqueness view of definiteness, a distinction between two uses of definite descriptions is proposed: ‘Given definites’ represent identity anaphors exploiting the...