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...

Kaplan (1989) showed us that demonstratives are special for two reasons. First, they are connected to the context: the “canonical” uses of demonstratives (to adopt Roberts’s (2002) terminology) are associated with demonstrations, extralinguistic acts that determine the reference. Second, they’re a particularly clear case of constituents with what Kaplan calls “prepropositional” content – that i...

Two problems related to the analysis of noun phrases in which demonstratives occur are discussed: (1) it is shown that there exists an infinite number of syntactically complex demonstrative noun phrases and thus an infinite number of noun phrases which are neither purely referential not purely quantificational, (2) some problems concerning the semantic role of the common noun to which demonstra...

German demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, and definite articles are segmentally identical but differ strongly in the frequency with which they appear. We examined the production of five such particles in a reading task. In a comparison of orthographically identical word pairs belonging to different lexical classes we found small but significant differences in word and vowel duration, pr...