Abstract
Standard wisdom holds that in order for a use of a definite description to be felicitous, its referent must be familiar', either because it was mentioned in previous discourse or because it is otherwise salient in the non-linguistic context. I show that a grammatically-defined class of demonstrably definite NPs containing definite possessors (e.g., that man's daughter) are routinely able to describe novel (unfamiliar) entities. I propose to account for this systematic class of exceptions to the standard familiarity requirement by providing a refined notion of familiarity, one that determines when a use of a possessed NP as a whole will count as familiar based (in part) on whether its possessor phrase counts as familiar.
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