La importancia de ser complejo

According to Maite Ezcurdia, demonstratives are directly referential expressions with complex linguistic meanings. This distinction between levels of meaning resulting from her analysis of how different types and uses of demonstratives anaphorically interact leads her to conclude that simple demonstratives are non-compositionally complex, while complex demonstratives are so, partially, due to composition. In this article, I both extend her methodology and discuss her conclusions. I argue that the distinction between demonstratives results from how different types of contexts of use work to select the referent, not from semantic composition. As Maite taught us, complexity isn’t always compositional.