Doubling Definite Determiners in German 

In this paper, we investigate a special kind of determiner in German, which has gone unnoticed so far, namely DPs with doubled definite determiners (we dub them 'DD-DPs' for doubled definite DPs). We argue that they are non-referential expressions that not only constrain the current discourse model in which they can felicitously be used, but also a related speech context. We suggest that DD-DPs presuppose the existence of a speech context other than the current one, and that a definite or name must be used in the presupposed conversation. We also show that, with the help of the pragmatic principle 'Maximize Presupposition', DD-DPs give rise to an implicated presupposition of non-uniqueness.