A longstanding issue in the various theoretical approaches to definiteness is the commonness of certain constructions that involve the definite article but seem to defy uniqueness and familiarity. These comprise definite descriptions with indefinite possessors such as the student of a linguist and such combinations as go to the store and hear on the radio, which, following Poesio (Reference Poesio, Mandy and Santelmann1994), Barker (Reference Barker, Kim, Lander and Partee2005), Carlson & Sussman (Reference Carlson, Sussman, Kepser and Reis2005), came to be known as ‘weak definiteness’ and ‘indefinite definites’, respectively. An adjacent and equally complex field that has aroused considerable attention among semanticists is the field of (non-)specificity (see von Heusinger Reference von Heusinger, von Heusinger, Maienborn and Portner2011 for an overview), including that of (non-)referentiality in connection with incorporated nouns (Farkas & de Swart Reference Farkas and de Swart2003, Dayal Reference Dayal2011). It is therefore most welcome that Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Bert Le Bruyn & Joost Zwarts have, by including weak indefinites, widened the notion of weak definiteness to that of ‘weak referentiality’.

In their thematic introduction, ‘Advances in weak referentiality’, the editors provide an excellent overview of the various properties of weak referentiality. A characterisation of the phenomenon that goes beyond the property of obligatory narrow scope is hard to pin down, so the authors conceive it as a ‘cluster concept, covering the different ways in which an indefinite or definite noun phrase can depart from those noun phrases that straightforwardly introduce or pick up an individual referent’ (4). Apart from scope deficiency and non-introduction of a discourse referent, the cluster comprises number neutrality, close connection to (or incorporation into) verbs or prepositions, and semantic enrichment (e.g. ‘doing shopping’ in the case of go to the store). The matter is addressed in all its complexity but at the same time in a concise and accessible fashion.

The remaining fourteen papers are arranged according to five thematic fields; indefinites, incorporation, predication, number, and (weak) definites.

Two papers focus on indefinites. Maria Aloni & Angelika Port (‘Modal inferences in marked indefinites: The case of German irgend-indefinites’) identify the various contexts in which irgend ‘at all’ is licit, either as a determiner or as pronoun. The authors orient themselves towards an extended version of Haspelmath’s implicational ordering of the functions of indefinites. On the basis of a vast digital corpus, they establish four major meaning variants for irgendein ‘any, some’ and irgend jemand ‘anybody, somebody’: specific unknown, negative polarity, epistemic unknown and deontic free choice, of which the latter two arise under modals. The authors analyse this distribution within the Dynamic Semantics framework. Tania Ionin (‘Epistemic and scopal properties of some indefinites’) presents two judgement experiments on (non-)specificity, which include the role of stress. Compared to $a$ indefinites, singular some indefinites render wide-scope readings more acceptable, but epistemic specificity less available. These contrasts are even stronger with stressed SOME, which is incompatible with epistemic specificity, whereas a scopally specific reading is facilitated. Ionin identifies this reverse alignment of scopal and epistemic specificity found for some (but not for a certain) indefinites as unexpected. She points to complexities such as opposite scope preferences with respect to intensional operators versus the universal quantifier, and leaves it to future research whether and how the two dimensions are related.

Tibor Kiss & Claudia Roch (‘Antonymic prepositions and weak referentiality’) provide a corpus-based investigation of the presence versus omission of determiners in combination with German mit ‘with’ and ohne ‘without’. They review the possibility of argument incorporation as found with articleless NP objects of verbs, which are typically discourse-opaque, hence weakly referential. The authors highlight cases in which a bare NP complement of ohne is referentially picked up by a pronoun or a relative clause and should therefore be analysed as referential. They conclude that a weak referentiality analysis of preposition–noun combinations cannot explain that determiner omission is considerably more frequent with ohne than with mit. Further asymmetries, such as modification by adjectives or postnominal possessors as an obligatory licensing factor of determiner omission for mit but not for ohne, are argued to contradict a unified analysis under which the distinctive feature of the antonymic pair is that ohne invokes negation.

In Lidia Bogatyreva & M. Teresa Espinal’s contribution ‘Weak referentiality and Russian instrumental nominals’, which focuses on predication, weak referentiality is taken in a broad sense since the nominals discussed are not in argument position. The authors compare bare nominals in Catalan with those marked by the instrumental case in Russian. They propose that predicate nominals are generated in the complement position of a covert function F corresponding to English ‘with’. NPs in this position are weakly referential. The authors propose a unified account of instrumental nominals that relates the different interpretations to different locations of the F projection. Strong readings are correlated with strong/structural case (nominative or accusative), whereas weak readings (i.e. non-arguments, including adjuncts) are associated with weak/oblique case (instrumental or genitive).

The next two papers deal with number. Cristina Schmitt & Ellen-Petra Kester (‘Predicate nominals in Papiamentu: A comparison with Brazilian Portuguese and other languages’) raise the question of why profession/role predicates such as (be a) doctor do not take the plural marker in Papiamentu (a Portuguese-based Creole) but obligatorily do so in Standard Brazilian Portuguese. The authors argue that profession/role predicates do not have number semantics and if number is realised; this is due to agreement with the subject DP. The typological difference is analysed as resulting from the vocabulary items: the Papiamentu plural marker -nan, in contrast to Brazilian -$s$, is assumed to have a definiteness feature. Therefore, it cannot be checked against predicative NPs, which lack such a feature. The analysis is somewhat technical and it is not obvious whether it can be given a semantic rationale. Eric Mathieu’s paper ‘Many a plural’ investigates the different plurals in Standard Arabic and the dialect from Saudi Arabia. Sound and broken plurals are interpreted as referring inclusively (to one or more) and allow weakly referential use in contexts of modality and negation, whereas morphologically composed plurals (that is, plurals of singulatives or of broken plurals) do not. Mathieu argues for a distribution of the plural forms along several heads in the DP, so that referentiality matches with syntactic position. The account offers an amendment to current syntactic analyses of DP structure, which makes the paper interesting in its own right, but only loosely connected to the volume’s general topic.

The section on weak definites starts with ‘Telic definites and their prepositions: French and Serbian’ by Tijana Ašić & Francis Corblin, who focus on the interpretation of complements of locational prepositions as in John went to the bank. The sentence has a purely locative reading, in which the bank is definite but not weak, and a telic reading, involving participation in the social activity a bank is designed for, in which the bank is a weak definite. For a telic reading to be licensed, the subject has to be human, the verb and the locative preposition need to be underspecified (neither the motion of the action nor the goal is semantically specified), and the argument of the preposition is a definite NP with a nominal head associated with telic qualia. Following previous work by Corblin, the French definite NP in such telic constructions has neither a generic nor an idiomatic interpretation. Rather, its interpretation is associative, or functional, and telic readings emerge if semantic enrichment in the above-mentioned sense is triggered. The paper presents a contrastive analysis of French, which has an obligatory definite article and an underspecified preposition à, and Serbian, which lacks articles and uses different prepositions. The comparison shows that the telic reading does not depend on the presence of a definite article.

The three following papers are also concerned with the ontological status of weak definites. Florian Schwarz (‘How weak and how definite are Weak Definites?’) analyses weak definites in line with all other definite NPs, especially with respect to uniqueness. Their special characteristics are analysed by taking them to arise in verb phrases that denote kinds of events, ‘whose atomic instantiations involve precisely one individual matching the description of the predicate’ (226). For sentences such as John read the newspaper for hours, this captures the possibilities of John reading several newspapers or only sections of one, as well as the observation that such verb phrases are atelic. Furthermore, Schwarz provides an argument that the existence presupposition also holds for weak definites. His approach is thus in line with Le Bruyn’s paper (see below), in that it is explicitly argued that the meaning of the definite article is invariant. Ana Aguilar-Guevara & Maartje Schulpen (‘Modified weak definites’) focus on the combination of adjectives with weak definites and raise the question which kinds of adjectives can occur in weak definite configurations and why. Comprehending weak definites as referring to kinds, the authors propose that only adjectives denoting properties of kinds, such as psychiatric in psychiatric hospital, as opposed to old hospital, can maintain weak interpretations. They underpin their analysis by two experiments on sloppy readings of (modified) weak definites in Dutch. In ‘Functional frames in the interpretation of weak nominals’, Joost Zwarts departs from the view that weak definites are kind-referring and argues instead that they refer to roles in frames. Frames are conceived of as structures for representing stereotyped situations. Based on Pustejovsky’s qualia structure, Zwarts assumes that weakly referring nouns have a telic role, which defines a function with respect to other entities. Due to uniqueness of the role within the frame (e.g. ‘receiving medical treatment’ in case of be in hospital), a unique interpretation of weak definites arises. Zwarts’s analysis combines two independent notions from lexical semantics, namely frames and telic roles, the combination of which accounts for why weak nominals occur with certain verbs and prepositions; e.g. Ada is near the hospital has no weak reading (269). This contribution represents more of a research programme than a full-fledged analysis. It is not quite clear to what extent Zwarts’s frame approach goes beyond the analysis by Ašić & Corblin, who also make use of Pustejovsky’s qualia structure. At any rate, it is an interesting perspective.

Peter de Swart & Geertje van Bergen (‘Unscrambling the lexical nature of weak definites’) discuss the influence of (weak) definiteness on direct object scrambling in Dutch. Based on an extensive discussion of corpus data and rating experiments, the authors find that referentially weak objects are reluctant to precede adverbs, whereas strong objects are not. The authors raise the question whether the notion of ‘weak definiteness’ can be reduced to lexical relatedness between verb and object, and come to the result that it is at least useful in predicting which object NPs have a status as weak definites, especially when the verb can be predicted from a particular object (e.g. ‘wash’ in the case of ‘the dishes’). It would be interesting to see whether de Swart & van Bergen’s notion of lexical relatedness can be given a semantic explication, and whether their proposal can be further substantiated against the background of incorporation.

In ‘Inalienable possession: The status of the definite article’, Bert Le Bruyn deals with French possessive constructions that differ from their English counterparts in that they typically exhibit the definite article rather than a possessive pronoun, e.g. Il a levé le main ‘He raised his arm’. The major claim is that the meaning of the French definite article is (unlike in other approaches) no different from that of English and exhibits the standard uniqueness semantics. That it nevertheless occurs in the above-mentioned construction type is explained by assuming, with Barker (Reference Barker, Kim, Lander and Partee2005), that relational nouns can map the possessor to a singleton set containing, e.g. the possessor’s abstract hand, rather than to a concrete object. Le Bruyn convincingly argues that ‘there is no deep variation across languages and that definite inalienable constructions are as (un)constrained in French as they are in English’ (326). To account for the difference, he points out that in contrast to body part terms, some other relational nouns (of which he only mentions side) denote an ‘existential relation’, thus, they satisfy relationality even when the possessor is not realised; compare sit on the side. The variation is taken to be primarily lexical, concretely, as concerning combinations of verbs with NPs such as point the finger that yield non-literal interpretations.

Urtzi Etxeberria (‘Basque nominals: From a system with bare nouns to a system without’) analyses the dialect differences in the application of the definite article -$a(k)$. In Standard Basque its use has expanded to weak indefinites in object position, whereas Souletin Basque, which is taken to represent the older stage, still employs bare nouns in that function. The diachronic development is interpreted as the loss of a phonetically null D and its replacement by the overt definite article. Etxeberria thereupon asks why this development is not shared by numerous other languages that exhibit bare nouns with narrow scope existential interpretation. Beside a theory-internal explanation, he offers an independent morphological motivation: Since the occurrence of the Basque number marker is phonologically bound to the article, bare nouns are number-neutral. Therefore, reanalysis of the definite article ensures number marking throughout.

The final paper, ‘Referential properties of definites and salience spreading’, by Petra B. Schumacher & Hanna Weiland actually constitutes an outline of a piece in a larger psycholinguistic programme, namely the computation of accessibility information and updating of discourse structure. In order to connect their findings to the expectations for weak definites, the authors first provide an expedient summary of the properties of weak definites, which nicely complements the editors’ introduction. They subsequently report on processing studies (ERP recordings) of ‘regular’ definites and indefinites, as well as on discourse salience and set relations, eventually developing predictions concerning the processing effort for weak definites. In doing so they substantively embrace the contributions of the current volume.

The volume clearly broadens the understanding of weak indefinites and definites, thus, of referentiality in general, by further developing the theoretic concepts and by highlighting several aspects such as combination with verbs and prepositions, modification, scrambling and processing. In addition, the book represents the infrequent case in which the contributions to an edited volume are throughout inherently justified (although perhaps those on predication and on number are less central than the others). A slight drawback is that although the obvious link between weak definites and incorporation is stated in several papers, none of them engage with object incorporation as such. Given the growing awareness of the delineation of weak indefinites and (pseudo-)incorporated nominals subsequent to Dayal (Reference Dayal2011) (see the volume by Borik & Gehrke Reference Borik and Gehrke2015), we would have liked to see corresponding aspects such as argument status and predicate modification considered. However, from a typological perspective, the better-studied phenomena of English and e.g. French and Dutch have been reasonably well supplemented by including, among others, Serbian (as a language without articles), Basque and Arabic. Finally, what makes the book attractive in our view is that virtually all papers are highly accessible because they are not too firmly tied to particular frameworks, yet still present high-level theoretical analyses. Altogether, the volume will surely reward its readers, be they interested in NP semantics and syntax or simply interested in compositional semantics in general.