Barbara H. Partee: 2005. “A Note on Mandarin Possessives, Demonstratives, and Definiteness”. In Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn, eds. Gregory Ward and Betty Birner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
This paper begins from some difficulties in trying to capture in English a range of contrasting examples of possessive phrases in Mandarin. From there we will be led to a re-examination of the interpretation of certain English definite expressions and more generally to the interpretation of definiteness.