UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)

Complex demonstratives

GEORGE POWELL


 

Are complex demonstratives (expressions of the form ‘that F’) referring expressions or quantifiers? Their semantic behaviour seems to pattern sometimes with the former, sometimes with the latter. In this paper I examine both referential and quantificational accounts of complex demonstratives in order to show that neither side satisfactorily accounts for the all the data. I then outline an alternative analysis on which, although lexically univocal, complex demonstratives can give rise to genuinely singular or genuinely quantificational truth conditions according to context.


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