We will meet on Wednesday, November 18, 1:30-2:30pm in Herbst 338. We are pleased to announce a talk by Satoshi Tomioka (University of Delaware):

Anaphoric bare nouns: Not all of them are definite descriptions

In some of the languages in which (in)definiteness is not obligatorily marked, bare common nouns can be used anaphorically. Such an instance of bare noun is commonly regarded as an anaphoric definite description — e.g., During my office hours, a student came to see me. I asked the student to wait for a couple of minutes. Contrary to this general consensus, I argue, inspired by the intuition reported in Minjoo Kim’s 2023 JEAL paper, that some instances of anaphoric bare nouns, ones in Japanese in particular, are used as if they were proper names. More concretely, anaphoric bare nouns are directly referential based on the speaker’s private naming conventions. I will demonstrate the distributional patterns of anaphoric bare nouns in Japanese that would be left unaccounted for under the definite description thesis. I further hypothesize that the availability of anaphoric bare nouns is tied to the lack of ‘repeated name penalty’.

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