Abstract
We closely investigate two specificity markers in German, namely, bestimmt and gewiss, by discussing their commonalities and differences w.r.t. matters of identification and scope-taking properties in connection with negation, nominal quantifiers, conditionals and intensional operators. Eventually we propose to analyse both markers as uniformly contributing the information that some salient agent is in possession of identifying knowledge of the referent that is introduced by the modified indefinite. The crucial differences between the two markers are that in case of gewiss, (1) this agent must be the speaker and (2) this information is contributed as a conventional implicature, whereas in the case of bestimmt, (1) the agent must not necessarily coincide with the speaker and (2) the information is contributed as at-issue meaning, which will allow for interaction of this meaning component with other operators in the sentence.
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Notes
- 1.
Ein is ambiguous between an interpretation as the indefinite determiner and an interpretation as the numeral one.
- 2.
The split among speakers with respect to the acceptability of (2-b, 2-g) and (3-b, 3-g) presumably reflects differences concerning the ability to perform the required separation at the level of LF: while for most speakers this is possible only in the case of indefinites with bestimmt, there are others for whom this is generally impossible, while a small minority can also perform it with indefinites containing gewiss.
- 3.
- 4.
See Houghton (2000) for a similar observation about English certain combined with proper names.
- 5.
See (Hinterwimmer and Umbach to appear) for an analysis of such readings with gewiss, Jayez and Tovena (2002) for the same phenomenon in French with un certain-indefinites and Eguren and Sánchez (2007) for this phenomenon with Spanish cierto.
- 6.
Example (10) stems from the DWDS Corpus: Die Zeit 50/2007.
- 7.
Note that the gloss lacks a translation for irgendein since we saw no way to get at a felicitous English sentence which contained both certain and some English equivalent to irgendein.
- 8.
Nevertheless, we found very few examples where irgend occurs together with gewiss. These cases all seem to involve reporting an earlier event where some other agent had identifying knowledge. Here it seems that irgend indicates speaker ignorance/indifference while gewiss indicates identifiability by the agent of the reported event. In this chapter, we will not go into much further detail about these cases.
- 9.
(18-b): COSMAS-II, SZ corpus.
- 10.
Note that also embedding Spanish cierto-indefinites under negation operators like no leads to ungrammaticality (Eguren and Sánchez 2007, ex. 26b).
- 11.
COSMAS-II, SZ corpus.
- 12.
We borrowed the term ‘intermediary’ reading from Farkas (2002), who speaks of ‘intermediary scope’. This is only in lack of a better term since we will not propose to analyse these readings in terms of an operator taking scope between two other operators.
- 13.
Eguren and Sánchez (2007) report that also Spanish cierto behaves as a specificity marker. However, unlike English certain or French certain or German gewiss/bestimmt, in current Spanish, it seems to have developed into a full determiner and is therefore usually used without a preceding determiner (for exceptions, see Eguren and Sánchez 2007, footnote 5). We will not discuss cierto in detail here.
- 14.
Note that also Spanish cierto can be used in cases where the speaker cannot identify the referent (see Eguren and Sánchez 2007, ex. 12).
- 15.
A condensed version of our approach can be found in Ebert et al. (to appear).
- 16.
Abusch and Rooth (1997) attribute the suggestion to treat a certain-indefinites as involving knowledge of the answers to identificational questions to Lauri Carlson.
- 17.
Note that n and m must be assigned distinct covers in order to render the identity question ↑ n x m non-trivial (see below).
- 18.
Farkas (2002) also notes that a certain seems to require that there is some non-random choice involved, if an a certain-indefinite is interpreted with narrow scope with respect to some other operator (cf. her ex. 54 and discussion below). Like Martin (this volume), she offers a different explanation for this fact than we do.
- 19.
For this reason, (45) is not compatible with zufälligerweise (‘accidentally’), that is, inserting the adverb would lead to infelicity.
- 20.
But consider the following translation of an example from Abusch and Rooth (1997) (their ex. 71), which sounds fine:
(i)
Solange ist in eine bestimmte Stadt in Italien gezogen.
Solange is in a bestimmt city in Italy moved.
‘Solange has moved to a certain city in Italy.’
- 21.
Likewise, if it is the speaker we get the reading that Peter set the stove to a temperature that the speaker can identify.
- 22.
We could give gewiss a CI semantics on its own as [[gewiss]] = \( {\rm K}_{\alpha} \)(↑ n y), thereby separating the meaning contributions of the indefinite and the modifier in the spirit of Potts (2005). However, as in the case of bestimmt, we then could not explain the very limited distribution of gewiss w.r.t. other types of DPs.
- 23.
A problem that Potts’ (2005) proposal has at that point (and that our proposal inherits) is the missing answer to the question why a free variable in the CI dimension introduced by a supplement cannot be resolved to any other individual except the one that is derived from an E-type treatment of the quantified anchor + additional material. This inflexibility hints towards a view that Potts rules out (ibid., Section 3.10), namely, to one that allows for binding from the at-issue domain into the CI domain. This would mean that the CI contribution of (62) should be of the form \( {\rm K}_{\alpha} \)(↑ n x), where x is the discourse referent introduced by the indefinite on the at-issue level. The narrow-scope reading in (78e) could thus be ruled out by appealing to the inaccessibility of any quantifier at the at-issue level that could dynamically bind x.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sigrid Beck, Maria Cieschinger, Judith Degen, Kai von Fintel, Andreas Haida, Irene Heim, Klaus von Heusinger, Stefan Hofstetter, Manfred Krifka, Sophie Repp, Henk Zeevat and the audiences at NELS 40, Sinn und Bedeutung 14, the Workshop Reference and Discourse Structure at the University of Stuttgart and the participants of the seminar Current Research Topics at the Syntax-Semantics Interface at the University of Tübingen for valuable comments and discussion.
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Ebert, C., Ebert, C., Hinterwimmer, S. (2013). The Interpretation of the German Specificity Markers Bestimmt and Gewiss . In: Ebert, C., Hinterwimmer, S. (eds) Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5310-5_3
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