INDEFINITENESS IN LANGUAGE

Definiteness and Indefiniteness *

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs) determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categ...

Indefiniteness in Counting

The Indefiniteness of Definiteness

This paper is about the difficulties involved in establishing criteria for definiteness. A number of possibilities are considered – traditional ones such as strength, uniqueness, and familiarity, as well as several which have been suggested in the wake of Montague’s analysis of NPs as generalized quantifiers. My tentative conclusion is that Russell’s uniqueness characteristic (suitably modified...

“Strong” Indefiniteness and Topicality1

The paper addresses the relation between “strong” or presuppositional readings of indefinite noun phrases and the notion of topicality in its sentential and discourse-level formulations. Previous discussions of the issue were generally based on the interpretative properties of indefinite noun phrases at positions associated with topicality (e.g. subject of an individual-level predicate, within ...

Polynomials and lemniscates of indefiniteness

For a large indefinite linear system, there exists the option to directly precondition for the normal equations. Matrix nearness problems are formulated to assess the attractiveness of this alternative. Polynomial preconditioning leads to polynomial approximation problems involving lemniscate-like sets, both in the plane and in Cn×n. A natural matrix analytic extension for lemniscates is introd...