Specificity as referential anchoring.

Ljudmila Geist

Abstract:

In some languages different specific and non-specific readings of indefinites may
be disambiguated by indefinite pronouns used as determiners. Our investigation of
specificity markers in Russian shows that they mark different referential anchoring
of new discourse referents which are introduced by indefinite noun phrases to
already established discourse referents. The idea of referential anchoring can be
modeled via parameterized choice functions. The proposed analysis suggests that
semantics and pragmatics divide the labor of fixing the anchor for indefinites. The
restrictions on the type of referential anchor may be encoded in the lexical entry of
the specificity marker, or arise pragmatically from contrasts to other possible
markers.