Linguistics Colloquium
In some of the languages which do not obligatorily mark (in)definiteness, bare common nouns can be used anaphorically. Such an instance of bare noun is commonly regarded as an anaphoric definite description -- e.g., During my office hours, a student came to see me. I asked the student to wait for a couple of minutes. Contrary to this general consensus, I argue, based on the intuition reported in Minjoo Kim's 2023 JEAL paper, that some instances of anaphoric bare nouns, ones in Japanese in particular, are used as if they were proper names. More concretely, anaphoric bare nouns can be considered as the speaker's private naming conventions. I will demonstrate the distributional patterns of anaphoric bare nouns in Japanese that would be left unaccounted for under the definite description thesis. I further hypothesize that the availability of anaphoric bare nouns is tied to the lack of 'repeated name penalty'.
