Weak definites as a form of definiteness: experimental investigations

Abstract

Definite noun phrases typically refer to entities that are uniquely identifiable in the speaker and addressee’s common ground. However, some definite noun phrases (e.g. the hospital in Mary had to go the hospital and John did too) seem to violate uniqueness. We discuss a series of experiments that seek to understand some of the properties of this class of definites. We consider most carefully the hypothesis that these “weak definite” interpretations arise in implicitly “incorporated” constructions, attempting to provide a sketch of this hypothesis’ motivation and potential consequences. In our experiments we found that compared to regular definites, the weak definites need not refer uniquely, and readily trigger semantically enriched readings that compete effectively with normal inferences one might draw from a sentence. Perhaps the most surprising finding in the experiments is that nouns that could occur as weak definites, also seemed to retain some of these “weak” properties even when expressed as indefinites. We try and make sense of this within the “incorporation” framework.