Abstract

It is generally thought that definite determiners exclusively mark nouns as definite. In several languages, however, definite determiners may modify both nouns and verbs. As I will argue, the existence of these “multi-functional” elements suggests that determiners are in fact phrases. This syntactic move has a philosophical payoff. Among other things, it allows us to cast Donnellan's distinction as an ordinary consequence of the context-invariant compositional semantics of natural language, not as a matter of contextual manipulation or lexical ambiguity. Multi-functional determiners show us that Donnellan's distinction is, contra Donnellan, a matter of grammar.