Abstract This article explores the realization of definiteness in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. I show that Chuj provides support for recent theories distinguish between weak and strong definite descriptions (e.g., Schwarz 2009, 2013; Arkoh Matthewson Hanink 2018; Jenks 2018). A set morphemes called “noun classifiers” contribute a uniqueness presupposition, composing directly with no...

An utterance of (2a) means of course that there is only one author of Waverley – indeed, that is most likely one’s point when one uses (2a). But (2b) can mean that there is strictly more than one author of Waverley, on the reading that can be paraphrased, ‘It’s not the case that only Scott is an author of Waverley’. In (2c) the question may concern the number of authors; if the answer is no, th...

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...

In this paper, we study the 3D Lamé system and establish its weighted positive definiteness for a certain range of elastic constants. By modifying the general theory developed in [4], we then show, under the assumption of weighted positive definiteness, that the divergence of the classical Wiener integral for a boundary point guarantees the continuity of solutions to the Lamé system at this point.