Investigating the enriched meaning of regular and weak definites and indefinites

Abstract

Sentences with weak definites typically carry enriched meanings that go beyond literal meanings formed by a straightforward composition of their constituents. Aguilar-Guevara and Schulpen (2011) devised a method to test whether enriched meanings are part of the semantics of weak definite constructions or arise as pragmatic inference. In this paper, their suggestion that enriched meaning could arise from world knowledge associated with nouns is tested by performing an experiment with an abbreviated form of their method. The enriched meaning of sentences containing weak definites, regular definites, and their indefinite counterparts were compared. The results show that enriched meanings of sentences were broadly similar regardless of whether nouns that take a weak definite had a definite or indefinite article. This suggests that enriched meaning of weak definites can be attributed to the nouns themselves, rather than the construction they are a part of.