Empirically adequate semantics of indefinite descriptions

Team: Justyna Grudzińska, Bartosz Maćkiewicz

Students: Sebastian Jagła (from 2018), Aleksandra Bilińska (2017–2018), Agnieszka Gajewska (2017–2018), Maria Strzelecka (2017–2018).

Indefinite descriptions, such as “a (certain) student” in English and “jakiś (pewien) student” in Polish, are the subject of numerous theoretical controversies. The project aims to conduct a series of experiments addressing fundamental questions about their semantics.

One major controversy concerns the unusual scope behaviour of indefinite descriptions in complex sentences. Quantificational expressions, such as “every student” in English or “każdy student” in Polish, respect island constraints imposed by subordinate clauses, including relative clauses and conditional antecedents, and permit only local readings. Many researchers, however, claim that indefinite descriptions can take scope outside such clauses and allow long-distance readings. For example, “Every student read every book that a (certain) professor had recommended”, with the indefinite embedded in a relative clause, is claimed by many authors to allow the narrow, local reading (“every student” > “every book” > “a (certain) professor”) as well as the long-distance wide (“a (certain) professor” > “every student” > “every book”) and intermediate (“every student” > “a (certain) professor” > “every book”) readings.

Ionin (2010) conducted experiments investigating the availability of long-distance readings of English indefinites. For descriptions with “a”, the narrow reading was most readily available, with average acceptance close to 90%. For “a certain”, the wide reading was preferred, again with average acceptance close to 90%. Average acceptance of intermediate readings did not exceed 50% in either case (Ionin, 2010, The scope of indefinites: an experimental investigation).

The first part of our project replicates Ionin’s study in Polish, which, unlike English, has no articles. We use the indefinite pronouns “jakiś” and “któryś” as counterparts of “a”, and “pewien” as a counterpart of “a certain”. This part investigates whether long-distance readings are available for Polish indefinites. The second part examines the origins of intermediate readings and the factors that may increase their acceptance in English and Polish. The third, theoretical part will propose an experimentally adequate semantics of indefinite descriptions covering languages both with and without articles.