Determiners and (Un)certainty

Abstract

As noted by Haspelmath (1997), determiners and pronouns sensitive to "knowledge of the speaker" exist in different languages.Examples are the -to series in Russian, some and a certain (see Farkas, thi� volume), and irgendein in German (Kratzer 2001).This paper examines the episternic properties of a set of French determiners, i.e. un N quelconque (some), quelque (some) and un certain (a certain).They ap pear to be in complementary distribution due to their symmetric sensitivities to the epistemic status of the NP referent.We aim to contribute to a better understanding of their sensitivity by relating it to the well-known problem of "identifiability" in epistemic logic.

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