Definiteness and Anaphora
This cross-linguistic collaborative project (with Yağmur Sağ, Jian Cui , and Kathryn Davidson) investigates how discourse structure shapes the use of referential expressions, such as definite and demonstrative descriptions, and aims to identify the pragmatic constraints that govern their acceptability across languages. A central focus is the behavior of demonstratives in anaphoric contexts. While traditional accounts have assumed that anaphora offers no new insight into the theory of definites and demonstratives, since both appear felicitous in continuations like “A boy walked in. The/That boy sat down.” This work shows that anaphora provides a powerful diagnostic for uncovering subtle pragmatic distinctions between these expressions.
Using a cross-linguistically scalable experimental paradigm, I test how definites and demonstratives are licensed across languages that encode definiteness in different ways, including English, Bangla, Turkish, German, and Mandarin. The results reveal robust and replicable cross-linguistic patterns: definites are felicitous when conditions of familiarity and uniqueness are met, while demonstratives require a contrastive context—one that makes same-kind alternatives salient. This consistent pattern across typologically diverse systems points to a conceptual universality in how demonstratives are licensed.