Definite articles and demonstratives share many features in common including a related etymology and a number of parallel communicative functions. The following paper is concerned with developing a novel proposal on how to distinguish the two types of expression. First, crosslinguistic evidence is presented to argue that demonstratives contain locational markers that are employed in deictic uses to force contrastive focus and accentuate an intended referent against a contextual background. Conversely, definite articles lack such markers. Demonstratives are thus more likely to force referential interpretations, whereas definite descriptions are more open to attributive ones. Second, an analysis of determiner phrases is provided to illustrate that certain syntactic projections capture deictic differences between the two expressions. Semantic correlates of the proposal are then considered before it is situated with respect to contemporary work distinguishing the two categories on the basis of a non‐redundancy condition (that the overt noun phrase complement of a demonstrative may not denote a singleton set), which I suggest is derivative on the presence of contrastive deictic markers in demonstratives.

中文翻译：

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Deixis，指示语和定语

定冠词和指示词有许多共同点，包括相关的词源和许多并行的交流功能。接下来的论文是关于如何区分这两种类型的表达提出一个新颖的建议。首先，提供了跨语言证据，以证明指示词包含地点标记，这些地点标记在专门用途中用于迫使对比焦点和在上下文背景下强调目标对象。相反，定冠词缺少此类标记。因此，指示性指示更倾向于强制性引用解释，而明确性描述对定语性指示更为开放。其次，提供了对确定性短语的分析，以说明某些句法投影捕获了两种表达方式之间的明显差异。