Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the discourse prop-erties of weak definites (go to the doctor), and compare themto indefinites (go to a doctor) in German. While indefinite andweak definite noun phrases are highly similar when it comesto their sentence-level meaning, our visual world eye trackingstudy shows that weak definites are significantly less accessi-ble than indefinites when an ambiguous pronoun needs to beresolved in the subsequent discourse. However, contra someaccounts of weak definites, our results also show that it is verymuch possible for an anaphoric expression to access a weakdefinite. In sum, our experiment suggests that weak definitesintroduce new referents into a discourse, but that those refer-ents are embedded into an event structure associated with thestereotypical meaning of a weak definite construction. As a re-sult, referents introduced by weak definites are less prominentthan referents introduced by indefinites.