Date:
Thursday, April 18, 2024, 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Location:
2 Arrow Street, Room 420
You can find the details of Ankana's work below:
Title: What does anaphora tell us about definiteness? An experimental study
Abstract: The notion of definiteness is comprised of several different building blocks, such as uniqueness, indexicality, anti-uniqueness, and anaphora. While the first three of these make categorical distinctions between definite and demonstrative descriptions, it has been argued in prior literature that anaphora does not distinguish between definites and demonstratives, and hence doesn't bear on the theory of definiteness. I argue against this view by illustrating that definites and demonstratives show subtle preference-based contrast in some aspects of their anaphoric behavior, which gets thrown into relief by the critical manipulation of certain contextual variables. I highlight why this phenomena is particularly well suited for experimental investigation, sketching the boundaries of the experimental design, and show how the results provide a baseline paradigm that can be used to investigate contentious cases of definites of demonstrates in other languages. I use this paradigm to present some new experimental data on the German anaphoric definite and the demonstrative, whose distinction (or lack there of) has been an open issue in the theoretical literature.