Definite descriptions constitute a core device for managing reference in natural language, and their semantics has been explored in great detail within formal approaches. There also is a rich descriptive literature on cross‐linguistic phenomena concerning definites, but the theoretical literature has only recently begun to incorporate a wider range of languages and phenomena in this realm. The present paper provides an illustrative overview of one class of recently discussed cross‐linguistic phenomena, focusing on languages that differentiate between different kinds of definites (namely German, Fering, Akan, Mauritian Creole, Lakhota, Hausa, and Haitian Creole) and the theoretical views that seem to capture the two types most straightforwardly: one type of definite, involving ‘weak articles’, is based on uniqueness, whereas ‘strong article’ definites crucially involve an anaphoric link. The contrast extends to so‐called bridging uses in interesting ways, and the fact that there is a striking resemblance in the contrast across typologically unrelated languages points to a fundamental distinction that natural languages can utilize in organizing their referential system. The paper closes with an outlook on directions for future research.

We compare two aspects of meaning, namely the presupposition of stop in the scope of negation (John didn't stop going to the movies on Wednesday., → John used to go to the movies before Wednesday.) and scalar implicatures associated with strong scalar items under negation (John didn't always go to the movie last week. → John sometimes went to the movies last week.) ('Indirect Scalar Implicatures' (ISIs) Chierchia, 2004). Our results replicate the finding by Chemla and Bott (2013) that global presupposition interpretations are faster with a different methodology that avoids a potential confound of response bias. More surprisingly, ISIs are found to pattern with presuppositions in that responses reflecting an interpretation without an inference (corresponding to a 'literal' interpretation) are slower than ones based on the relevant inference, contrary to what has been found for direct scalar implicatures. These results are puzzling from the traditional perspective that ISIs are generated in the same way as direct implicatures. We explore two possible interpretations: first, strong scalar terms could receive a presuppositional analysis as well and presuppose that their domain is non-empty. Alternatively, we could group stop and ISIs together from another angle and see them as obligatory scalar implicatures, in contrast to the non-obligatory direct ones.

This paper explores the potential for a unified analysis of Weak Definites and regular definites. I first consider and argue against assimilating Weak Definites to co-varying interpretations of regular definites via general mechanisms. Next, I present a new proposal for analyzing Weak Definites, which sees them as regular definites occurring in verb phrases that denote kinds of events. This has the promise of allowing us to maintain a unified analysis of definites in terms of uniqueness while at the same time capturing the special properties of Weak Definites.

This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the selfpaced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.

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