Definiteness and Anaphora

This topic studies the meaning of definite and indefinite noun phrases and how pronouns and other anaphoric expressions pick up referents across a discourse.

Definition

Definiteness is the grammatical marking of whether a noun phrase's referent is treated as identifiable or unique; anaphora is the dependence of an expression's interpretation on a previously introduced antecedent.

Scope

The topic covers the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, the familiarity and uniqueness analyses of definiteness, and the phenomenon of anaphora, whereby an expression depends for its interpretation on an antecedent. It centres on dynamic theories of meaning, especially Heim's File Change Semantics and Kamp and Reyle's Discourse Representation Theory, which model how indefinites introduce discourse referents that pronouns can later access, accounting for cross-sentential and donkey anaphora.

Core questions

• What distinguishes definite from indefinite noun phrases semantically?
• How do pronouns find and depend on their antecedents across sentences?
• How are donkey sentences, where a pronoun seems bound by an indefinite outside its scope, to be analysed?
• Why are dynamic theories of meaning needed to handle anaphora?

Key concepts

• definite vs. indefinite
• familiarity and uniqueness
• discourse referent
• anaphora and antecedent
• donkey anaphora
• dynamic semantics

Key theories

File Change Semantics (Heim)

Indefinites introduce new discourse referents (file cards) and definites require familiar ones; meaning is the potential to update the file, capturing cross-sentential anaphora dynamically.

Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & Reyle)

Sentences are incrementally translated into discourse representation structures containing discourse referents and conditions, allowing pronouns to access referents introduced earlier and solving donkey anaphora.

History

Donkey sentences, noted by Geach, resisted classical analyses because an indefinite seemed to bind a pronoun outside its scope. In the early 1980s Heim's File Change Semantics and Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory independently introduced dynamic frameworks in which sentences update an evolving context, providing a unified account of definiteness, indefiniteness, and anaphora.

Debates

Familiarity vs. uniqueness theories of definiteness

Whether definite descriptions presuppose that the referent is already familiar in the discourse (Heim) or that it is unique in satisfying the descriptive content (the Russellian/Fregean tradition).

Key figures

• Irene Heim
• Hans Kamp
• Uwe Reyle
• Peter Geach

Seminal works

• heim1982
• kampreyle1993

Frequently asked questions

What is a donkey sentence?

It is a sentence like 'Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it', where the pronoun 'it' depends on the indefinite 'a donkey' even though that indefinite does not obviously have scope over the pronoun; dynamic theories were developed largely to handle such cases.