Determiners are phrases

Mind and Language 37 (5):893-913 (2022)
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Abstract

It is generally thought that definite determiners exclusively mark nouns as definite. In several languages, however, definite determiners may modify both nouns and verbs. As I will argue, the existence of these “multi‐functional” elements suggests that determiners are in fact phrases. This syntactic move has a philosophical payoff. Among other things, it allows us to cast Donnellan's distinction as an ordinary consequence of the context‐invariant compositional semantics of natural language, not as a matter of contextual manipulation or lexical ambiguity. Multi‐functional determiners show us that Donnellan's distinction is,contraDonnellan, a matter of grammar.

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Francesco Pupa
Nassau Community College

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References found in this work

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Demonstratives.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481--563.
Descriptions.S. Neale - 1996 - Critica 28 (83):97-129.

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