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Title:
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Two Types of Definites in Natural Language
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Author:
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Florian Schwarz
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://florianschwarz.net
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Massachusetts at Amherst
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2009
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Pragmatics
Semantics
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Director(s):
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Angelika Kratzer
Lyn Frazier
Barbara Partee
Charles Clifton Jr.
Christopher Potts
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Abstract:
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This thesis is concerned with the description and analysis of two
semantically different types of definite articles in German. While the
existence of distinct article paradigms in various Germanic dialects and
other languages has been acknowledged in the descriptive literature, the
theoretical implications of their existence have not been explored
extensively. I argue that each of the articles corresponds to one of the
two predominant theoretical approaches to analyzing definite descriptions:
the weak article encodes uniqueness. The strong article is anaphoric in
nature. In the course of spelling out analyses for the two articles, more
general issues relevant to current semantic theory are addressed, in
particular with respect to situation semantic analyses of donkey sentences
and domain restriction.
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