Lecture | LUCL Colloquium
Mistaken Identities
- Date
- Friday 13 March 2026
- Time
- Series
- LUCL Colloquium
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.02
Much work on the syntax and semantics of definite descriptions - including possessed nominals like my house, the child’s toy - has been devoted to arguing that such expressions can get either a referential interpretation (My cousin just walked in), with presuppositions both of existence and maximality , or a predicative interpretation (You’re not my cousin! I don’t have any cousins!). In recent work, however, Fiorin & Delfitto 2025 have argued that definites in copular clauses are always interpreted as referring expressions, and that this analysis avoids the cost of proposing that definites can have more than one semantic type, while also providing an account of some well-known obviation effects in copular sentences. In this talk I will argue that looking both more closely and more widely at a variety of cases - in a variety of languages - that have sometimes been lumped together under the heading of “equatives” or “identity” sentences shows can illuminate how best to carve up the observed distinctions between semantic and syntactic constraints.