On September 5, Professor Dorothy Ahn and recent graduate alum Ziling Zhu published an article in Natural Language Semantics titled “A bridge to definiteness: identifying unique and relational definites through bridging.” The full article can be accessed at this link, and the abstract is copied below.
Abstract:
“Definiteness covers a range of related meanings such as uniqueness and familiarity that are difficult to tease apart. The notion of bridging provides a testing ground for identifying the underlying mechanisms licensing definite expressions. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which Mandarin bare nouns and demonstratives license unique and relational bridging, exploring how these expressions carve up the definite space and differ from English definite expressions. Through comprehension and production studies, we show that Mandarin bare nouns and demonstratives readily allow unique and relational bridging, while English demonstratives are degraded. We further show that bare nouns license relational bridging only if the bridged noun is lexically relational, while demonstratives do not have such a restriction. We analyze Mandarin demonstrative na as a relationalizing operator that introduces an external index and a relational predicate in the restriction. This study has implications for existing analyses of Mandarin definite expressions and linguistic markings of definiteness, relationality, and anaphora.”
Congratulations to Dorothy and Ziling on this new publication!