e) those cases called simple FC1s which are dependent on temporal and spatial location.
E xamples of each type are shown below:
15.
a)the Empire State Building, the London Symphony Orchestra;
b)the year 1984, the word “the”, the opera Rigoletto;
c)the rumour that Reagan is going to resign, the dream to become rich;
d)the next/last/third president of the association;
e)the weather, the time, the air, the moon.
All these definite descriptions yield functional concepts. They always take one argument relative to the given situation. These concepts assign a functional value to situations. Descriptions such as the sun, the moon, the Earth assign the same value to a wide range of locations and time. For other descriptions the referents or values are more locally determined: the weather, the atmosphere. Proper names usually apply to a certain referent relatively to a domain of situations. A name like Paul is dependent on the social circumstances for its unambiguous interpretation. In many languages personal names are used with the definite article. They name something unambiguously which may not have been mentioned before; hearers do not need to find this named entity in the immediate context. These descriptions correspond to some of Hawkins' larger situation and unfamiliar uses.
Semantic FC2s with explicit arguments Generally an FC2 is connected to its second argument by a possessive relation (in the sense that something or someone has something). These cases syntactically consist of a definite article which precedes a complex expression containing the FC2 noun and a PP of the form of NP, as the examples below. A FC2 results in a FC1 when complemented with its argument. L?bner notes that the number of arguments referring to the situation may in fact vary: compare, for instance, descriptions such as the price of an apartment, the price of an apartment in Korea, the price of an apartment in Korea in the eighties.
16.
a)the president of the U.S.;
b)the meaning of the definite article.
Semantic FC2s with implicit arguments These descriptions depend on the immediate physical environment, which functions as an implicit deictic argument. Hawkins’introductory situational uses fall in this category.
17. This is the clutch.
I n the example above, the argument is a car in the immediate physical environment. Another example of implicit deictic FC2 is Hawkins’ larger situation use based on general knowledge:
18.The Prime Minister has resigned.
T he location of the utterance is included in the territory of a state to which the description refers (indirectly). L?bner also includes in this class those expressions that refer indirectly to referents previously introduced in the discourse, such as a book... the author, referring to them as FC2s with implicit anaphoric argument. (These cases correspond to Hawkins' associative anaphoric uses.) L?bner states that the crucial condition under which FC2s with implicit arguments are possible is that the head noun in these uses provides a two-place functional concept for which there is an appropriate argument in the immediate context (physical or linguistic). In (L?bner, 1996) it is claimed that the semantic/thematic roles of verbs are also FC2s. For every reading event, he says, there is the role of the reader and the role of the read; underlying theses roles are the functional concepts the reader of this reading event, and what is read in this reading event. Further roles may be connected to a reading event, such as medium, time, location, speed and others. In this later paper L?bner adopts a frame-like semantic network to explain FC2s with implicit anaphoric argument.
S emantic FC3s In these cases the definite article precedes a noun that is complemented with two arguments.
19. the distance between A and B
P ragmatic Definites
P ragmatic definites have non-functional head nouns (notice that it is the use, not the noun itself, that is relational or sortal) and thus depend on the particular situation or immediate context for unambiguous reference. They are pided in anaphoric, endophoric and deictic uses.
A naphoric These descriptions are resolved to a previously introduced referent (as in a book... the book). Hawkins’ anaphoric uses fall in this category.
E ndophoric (cataphoric) These definites have relational or sortal head nouns with disambiguating attributes, as in the example below. Hawkins classifies this use as unfamiliar with referent establishing relative clauses.
20.the woman Bill went out with last night
Deictic These uses refer to the immediate context, and correspond to Hawkins' immediate situation uses.
5. Fraurud′s study of first mention and subsequent uses
F raurud (1990) presents a corpus-based study of definite NPs use in Swedish distributed between the following text types: brochures, newspapers, textbooks and debate books (all professional, non-fiction prose, and based on a binary classification scheme: Subsequent mention: (corresponding to Hawkins' anaphoric definite descriptions and Prince's discourse old), and
First mention: including all other definite descriptions.
Fraurud's notion of subsequent mention is defined in terms of co-referentiality (NPs referring to the same entity). She notes that a NP that is co-referent with another NP is not necessarily anaphoric. The interpretation of an anaphor is crucially dependent on the identification of a discourse referent introduced by an antecedent (as is usually the case for pronouns); whereas co-referentiality only implies that a discourse referent previously mentioned in the discourse is evoked by an NP, but the NP's interpretation need not to be essentially dependent on this previous mention (as for subsequent mention of proper names). Fraurud's simplified taxonomy is due to the fact that she was primarily interested in verifying the empirical basis for the claim that indefinite NPs trigger the establishment of a new discourse referent in a discourse model while definite NPs trigger the search for or the retrieval of a prior discourse referent. She recognises that the existence of first mention definite NPs is acknowledged in the literature, but criticises the fact that they tend to be treated as secondary relative to the anaphoric use of definite NPs, giving as example Heim's File Change Semantics (discussed earlier). In her study Fraurud observes that only 34.8% of initial mention NPs were actually indefinites, and of all indefinites, only 9.4% were referred back to. She points to the problem for NP processing of having a vast number of entities made available for anaphoric reference and just a small portion being referred to. But perhaps the most interesting result is the large proportion of definite NPs in first mention uses found in her corpus: 60.9%. Also interesting is Fraurud's observation about the syntactic complexity of first mention definite NPs. She claims that genitive/possessive constructions of the form the X's Y or the Y of X, postposed prepositional phrases, and restrictive adjectival modifiers make the NP “self-contained”. These NPs, as L?bner's FC2s, explicitly sign their relation to other referents; and therefore, one would expect that complex definites be more often used as first than subsequent mention. And in fact, 75% of the complex definite NPs in her corpus were first mention.
6. Clark's bridging references
Clark’s paper “Bridging” (1977) is concerned with the construction of implicatures as part of the process of comprehension (understood as the computation of an antecedent). He identifies the possible semantic relations between the referring expression and its antecedent. Clark is only concerned with implicatures derived from textual relations, which correspond to Hawkins’ anaphoric and associative anaphoric uses. The distinctions he made are reviewed here for the specific case of definite descriptions.
Direct reference
Clark notes that a description often makes direct reference to previously mentioned objects, events or states.
