SIL talk by Imke Driemel (University of York)

Anaphoric definites and where they put the index

Since Schwarz’ (2009) dissertation, cross-linguistic evidence from a number of languages has emerged that points towards a morpho-syntactic distinction between uniqueness based definites like ‘the moon’ and ‘the sun’ on the one hand and anaphoric definites which make reference to a previously introduced discourse referent on the other. Semantically, anaphoric definites are different from uniqueness based definites in that the former introduces an index. In this talk, I will investigate where this index is introduced in the syntax and whether there is cross-linguistic variation regarding the position and the composition with the rest of the noun phrase. We will first look at the Kwa language Akan, for which I will present novel evidence based on resumption that the difference between anaphoric and uniqueness definites maps to size, i.e., DP vs. NP. An index is introduced via D in Spec,DP, therefore its absence indicates the lack of a DP-shell and uniqueness is achieved via an iota type shift (Jenks 2018). We will then look at Swedish, a language that displays double definiteness marking with modified nouns. Based on the observation that anaphoric definites, but not uniqueness based definites, allow for double definiteness, I conclude that at least in Swedish (and possibly Norwegian) the index enters the derivation in the form of a modifier (Matushansky 2010, Hanink 2018), thereby questioning the layering DP-shell approach for double definiteness (Julien 2005, Roehrs 2009) and providing an argument for a post-syntactic repair operation such as d-support (Embick & Noyer 2001). The comparison between such diverse language families indicates that the syntactic status of the index is not uniform across languages—a result that has repercussion for the universality of the semantics of the definite determiner.