Experimenting with the King of France

Abstract

Definite descriptions with reference failure have been argued to give rise to different truth-value intuitions depending on the local linguistic context in which they appear. We conducted an experiment to investigate these alleged differences. We have found that pragmatic strategies dependent on verification (Lasersohn 1993,von Fintel 2004) and topicalization (Strawson 1964, Reinhart 1981), suggested in the context of trivalent theories, both play a role in people’s subjective judgments. We suggest that a way to reconcile this finding is to assume that verification of a sentence –where possible – proceeds through a pivot constituent, and that this concept is relevant for the proper description of how speakers understand semantic meaning.At the same time, it seems that trivalent theories cannot easily account for the full pattern of the results found. We speculate that our findings are best explained by combining these pragmatic strategies with an approach that assumes that definite descriptions have a bivalent semantics, as well as a pragmatic presupposition attached to them.