Bridging uses of demonstrative pronouns in German

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to revisit the phenomenon of bridging anaphora (Clark, in: Johnson-Laird, Wason (eds) Thinking: readings in cognitive science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 411–420, 1977) from the perspective of the German demonstrative plural pronoun die ‘they’. I argue that antecedentless die ‘they’ can be analyzed as a novel definite that is licensed by a suitable, contextually given situation and denotes the salient person(s) who stand in a contextually given relation to that situation. Subsequently, I propose a formal semantic implementation of my analysis in terms of Elbourne (Situations and individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005; Definite descriptions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), analyzing the antecedentless demonstrative pronoun die ‘they’ as a definite description in disguise.