Definite Possessives and Discourse Novelty

Standard wisdom holds that in order for a use of a definite description to be felicitous, its referent must be `familiar', either because it was mentioned in previous discourse or because it is otherwise salient in the non-linguistic context. I show that a grammatically-defined class of demonstrably definite NPs containing definite possessors (e.g., that man's daughter) are routinely able to describe novel (unfamiliar) entities. I propose to account for this systematic class of exceptions to the standard familiarity requirement by providing a refined notion of familiarity, one that determines when a use of a possessed NP as a whole will count as familiar based (in part) on whether its possessor phrase counts as familiar. 3 1. Introduction Most modern discourse representation theories begin with some version of the following assumption: in order for a use of a definite description to be felicitous, the entity referred to by that description must be familiar from previous discourse. U...