Abstract

Recent work has brought to prominence the idea that some utterances contain occurrences of noun phrases that not only corefer, but do so in a particularly guaranteed or explicit way—call such occurrences ‘de jure coreferential’. Studies of de jure coreference have considered both the characteristics of the relation, and its explanation. Pinillos (154(2):301–324, 2011) argues that de jure coreference is non-transitive, and uses this as part of his argument for a new semantic primitive explaining de jure coreference. In this paper, I draw attention to a neglected distinction between de jure coreference and another kind of coreference with which it might easily be confused. I then consider Pinillos’s claim that de jure coreference is non-transitive, and conclude that even using Pinillos’s definition of de jure coreference, it is far from straightforward that he has demonstrated the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. I question whether Pinillos’s characterisation of de jure coreference is adequate, and offer a plausible alternative characterisation. I show that on this new characterisation, there is no evidence that the relation is non-transitive.