Accent and Description: an account of anaphoric epithets

Definite descriptions, like the pig behave differently in prosodically prominent (2) and non-prominent (1) environments. (I hate Jack but. . .) (1) Mary KISSED the pig. epithet: the pig = Jack (2) Mary kissed the PIG. standard: the pig = Jack In (2) the definite description picks out a uniquely salient pig. In the unaccented environment (1) the definite description the pig is an anaphoric epithet. Jackendoff (1972) analyses these epithets as a special class of pronouns due to their prosodic properties and their coreference to some antecedent. In (1) for example the epithet is coreferential with the discourse entity Jack. Jackendoff comments that any analysis that fails to treat them pronominally misses an important generalization. The semantic analysis of anaphoric epithets presented here endeavors to capture Jackend-off's generalization and implement it compositionally. Following Potts (2003) the nominal in an anaphoric epithet, e.g. pig in (1), is analyzed as Convetional Implicature (CI) element. The indexed definite article proposed by Elbourne (2005) is incorporated accounting for pronominal behavior. One implication of this synthesis of Elbourne and Potts's proposals is a structural difference between standard and anaphoric definite descriptions. Anaphoric definite descriptions include an argument of the definite article that influences accent placement algorithms. Umbach (2002) provides a recent analysis of deaccented definite descriptions within Discourse Representation Theory that takes Jackendoff's generalization seriously. Under her approach ac-cented definite descriptions uncontroversially achieve uniqueness through their descriptive content. In contrast de-accented definites behave like pronouns in achieving uniqueness through identification with a previously introduced discourse entity. Umbach's account analyzes the descriptive content of de-accented definites as a presupposi-tion. Her discussion makes clear however that it is better categorized as a conventional implicature (CI) element (Potts 2003). Potts identifies four defining characteristics of conventional implica-tures (p. 9): 1. They are part of the conventional (lexical) meaning of words. 2. They are commitments, and thus give rise to entailments. 3. The commitments are made by the speaker of the utterance " by virtue of the meaning of " the words he chooses. 4. They are logically and compositionally independent of what is " said (in the favored sense) " , i.e., independent of the at-issue entailments. The most telling evidence for the CI view of the epithetic nominal is its independence from the main proposition of the sentence. In (1) this independence is evident in two ways. First the NP pig plays no role in constraining …