On a theory of descriptions in article-less languages

I examine the unitary analysis of definite and indefinite descriptions proposed by Ludlow and Segal (2004), according to which there is a single underlying logical form shared across English (in)definite descriptions and artilcle-less noun phrases in languages without articles (e.g. Russian). I argue that Ludlow and Segal’s analysis cannot account for the contrast between English definite descriptions and the definite uses of Japanese article-less noun phrases with respect to the cancellability of uniqueness implications, which shows that their analysis is not correct for English, if it applies to Japanese. A first implication is that it is not feasible to provide a semantic analysis of (in)definite descriptions that universally applies to all languages. A second implication is that the revealed semantic variations support the traditional idea that that there is a mismatch between linguistic form and logical form, which undermines a Tractarian association between natural language syntax and logical form found in Stanley (2000) and King (2007).