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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