RESEARCH

PhD Project

Title: Definite Reference
Supervisor: ⇒ Prof. Dr. Peter Bosch

Definite reference is a classic topic in Linguistics and in the Philosophy of Language. It is a wide-spread view that the felicitous use of a definite description requires the corresponding referent to be unique, in some way or another, in the common ground (as defined, e.g., by Stalnaker (2002)). There are uses of definite descriptions, however, that do not seem to fulfill this requirement, but that are nonetheless felicitous. In my dissertation, I want to investigate some of these phenomena, i.e., uses of definite descriptions that cannot easily be accounted for within current standard theories of reference. Aiming at gaining a deeper understanding of definite reference, my work will be mainly theoretical, but experimental work (in cooperation with the Neurobiopsychology group) will also be part of this project.

Research Interests

My main research interests are centred around the theoretical foundations of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of definiteness, both from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view.

In my ⇒ Bachelor's thesis (pdf), I was concerned with contractions of prepositions and the definite article in German, and I also presented my results at various conferences or workshops.

More recently, i.e., in my ⇒ Master's thesis (pdf), I considered the Stalnaker-like theory of definiteness in more detail, observing that there are several uses of the definite article that cannot easily be accounted for in such a framework (these include, among others, the German preposition-article contractions).

In my dissertation I want to investigate the meaning of the definite article, both theoretically and experimentally, hoping to find evidence for my hypothesis that the definite article is, contrary to the standard view, indeed ambiguous.

More generally, I am interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface, including topics such as definiteness/indefiniteness, specificity, and reference. As a future cognitive scientist, the processing of natural language is also of interest to me, in particular the integration of non-linguistic information into the interpretation natural language utterances and the incrementality of processing.