We are happy to announce a talk by Veneeta Dayal (Yale) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Date: November 5, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Demonstrative to Definite: What Changes and What Stays the Same
Abstract: I posit that a demonstrative has two parts to its meaning, an indexical part and a contrastive part. The first demarcates a possibly proper sub-domain in the context of evaluation within which a unique referent must be established. It must also be possible for the referent to be contrasted with another entity in the context of evaluation or outside it, the property of anti-uniqueness. A definite lacks anti-uniqueness, and it also lacks indexicality, simply requiring its referent to be unique in the context of evaluation.
I show how this distinction accounts for certain well-known facts. The definite article is compatible with proper names in many languages. A proper name, suitably adjusted for type, satisfies the uniqueness requirements of the definite. Languages make a parametric choice about projecting a D. There is no cross-linguistic variation with respect to demonstratives – proper names are uniformly unacceptable. Strikingly, their unacceptability can be ameliorated under exclamatives – a fact that I suggest can only be explained with reference to the property of anti-uniqueness.
Finally, I consider cases where demonstratives require the support of a full DP to piggy-back on and argue that such cases crucially require distinguishing between indexicality and anti-uniqueness.
Against this background, I look at the case of strong vs. weak definite articles. Since Schwarz (2009), cross-linguistic studies have embraced the distinction between a strong familiarity-based definite and a weak uniqueness-based definite. But so far only Fering and German have been shown to have two distinct lexical forms of definite articles. What has actually been attested is a division of labor between either one definite determiner and a demonstrative (English), or a bare noun and a demonstrative (Mandarin). This raises the question of where exactly to place the strong-weak articles of the German-Fering kind in the typology of demonstratives and definites. I explore the possibility that the strong definite article presents an intermediate stage in the development path from the demonstrative to the weak definite.