The English past tense as a definite description

Abstract

There are two major groups of analyses in the literature on the English past tense; existential semantics with domain restriction, and the pronominal (i.e. anaphoric) analysis. In this paper, I discuss a group of data difficult for both of these analyses: the obligatory use of the English past in some contexts without any salient antecedent, such as asking Who built this church when pointing at a church (Kratzer 1998). The pronominal analysis predicts that the past tense should be infelicitous, while the existential analysis with domain restriction cannot account for the distribution of these data. I argue that these observations follow from a lexical ambiguity of the English past tense between an anaphoric and a uniqueness reading, parallel to similar patterns in definites (Schwarz 2009: a.o.).