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) holds up well against the others.
CITATION STYLE
Abbott, B. (2014). The Indefiniteness of Definiteness. In Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (Vol. 94, pp. 323–341). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01541-5_14
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