This talk is concerned with the grammatical mechanisms that interlocutors use to help establish the reference of DPs. In the first part of the talk, I present an analysis of class of prepositional and adverbial modifiers of referring expressions that I call identificational appositives, bolded in (1) below:
1. a. Marie here is coming over.
b. Joan’s mother, with the white hair, is amazing.
c. I just got a text from the accountant, from the party yesterday.
I show that these modifiers have two properties that don’t usually go together: they are restrictive – they are used by speakers to clarify the reference of the modified noun – but non-subsective – they don’t shrink the extension of the modified noun. Indeed, a variety of linguistic evidence shows that these expressions are appositives that fall outside of the scope of any uniqueness-enforcing determiner (e.g., iota) in their anchor DP. I specifically extend Onea & Ott (2022)’s analysis of nominal appositives to these expressions, analyzing them as fragment answers to implicit Questions of Identification (QoIs) – e.g., "Who is Marie?" – licensed by the anchor.
These two properties motivate a richer theory of this notion of restrictivity that has been discussed in the literature but often either misanalysed as a semantic notion or implicitly paired with a too-simple pragmatics of establishing reference in conversation. In contrast, I will argue that restrictivity is fundamentally a pragmatic notion that has to do with speaker reference, and use these appositives to argue for a particular theory of how speaker reference is established. This theory takes the goal of speaker reference to be coordination on which discourse referent is intended by the speaker (van Rooy 1997, Dekker 1998), where discourse referents are (i) weakly familiar in the sense of Roberts (2003) and (ii) formally represented by a free index attached to a referring expression (Dever 1998), explaining the implicit Question of Identification as a partition on assignments of this free index to actual indices present in the context. Since coordination on the value of a free index is a conversation level problem, information outside of the scope of the anchor, like these appositives, can be used to help aid in this process.
In other words, I will argue that identificational appositives represent overt linguistic material aiding in the process of anaphora resolution; developing a theory of these appositives thus requires us to follow others (van der Sandt 1992, Beaver 2004) in relaxing the idealizing assumption that takes indices to be pre-disambiguated during interpretation. At the end of the talk, I will argue that this discourse function allows us to use identificational appositives to better understand distinctions between types of referential expressions, showing that names and definite descriptions impose distinct constraints on which identificational appositives can be used to help disambiguate their reference.