Demonstratives and the semantics–pragmatics interface

Abstract

One of the most fundamental properties of language is its ability to refer to entities both in the world and those established in discourse. Across languages, speakers use a range of expressions to introduce, maintain, and distinguish referents. Among these, definite descriptions (for example, the book) and demonstrative descriptions (for example, that book) are two common ones that have been central to research on the semantics and pragmatics of nominal reference. Despite the considerable overlap in their distribution, demonstratives differ from definites in certain key aspects. This dissertation focuses on two cross-linguistically robust properties of demonstratives that distinguish them from definites: (i) their anti-uniqueness effect and (ii) their selective behavior in discourse anaphora. I examine these phenomena as a diagnostic window on the semantics–pragmatics interface, with the aim of clarifying the division of labor between grammatical meaning and discourse-level reasoning in the referential domain. The first part of the dissertation examines anti-uniqueness, the constraint that makes the use of demonstratives infelicitous in inherently unique contexts (for example, #That sun is bright). Drawing on novel data from Bangla, I show that the anti-uniqueness effect extends beyond demonstratives to certain classes of definites. I argue in favor of the presuppositional approach to anti-uniqueness, illustrating that it is better suited than approaches based on pragmatic economy to account for typological variation in this domain. I then introduce a modalized implementation of the presupposition that offers broader empirical coverage. The second part turns to discourse anaphora, introducing quantitative diagnostics for how definites and demonstratives are licensed across typologically diverse languages. Controlled experiments across English, Turkish, and Bangla reveal a consistent cross-linguistic asymmetry: demonstratives are uniquely sensitive to subtle information-structural contrasts, unlike definites. This empirical pattern isolates the pragmatic signature of demonstratives and provides a new experimental paradigm for testing competing theories of definite reference, particularly in languages whose definiteness systems are complex or remain under debate, as illustrated for Mandarin and German. The final part extends this pragmatic paradigm to investigate whether discourse-level constraints on reference are computationally tractable in artificial language systems. Using nineteen large language models, I examine how model size and architecture affect their ability to encode these distinctions. I illustrate that larger models show remarkable sensitivity to the discourse-structural constraints of demonstratives and closely mirror human behavior, whereas smaller models do not. These results provide the first systematic assessment of discourse-pragmatic competence in large language models, showing that the fine-grained pragmatic distinctions underlying demonstrative use are not easily learnable from surface-level statistics alone and emerge only in more advanced models. In sum, this dissertation integrates theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches to reveal how demonstratives illuminate the interaction between meaning and discourse across natural and artificial language systems. It (i) argues for a dissociation between the anti-uniqueness effects of referential expressions and their deictic component, and illustrates that the anti-uniqueness constraint is best analyzed as a semantically encoded feature, (ii) identifies the pragmatic constraints that govern demonstrative anaphora through cross-linguistic experimentation, establishing a robust empirical diagnostic, and (iii) evaluates how such discourse-level patterns emerge in large language models, providing a computational perspective on the semantics–pragmatics interface.