The paper examines some of the characteristic features of natural language interaction with a database system and its implications for the processing of singular definite descriptions. Some proposals are made for assessing the uniqueness claim of the singular definite article in the context of retrieval from a relational database. Other standard assumptions such as the extensional evaluation and referent evaluation exclusively in the database - rather than within the discourse model - are critically examined. INTRODUCTION A comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon of singular definite description in natural language processing constitutes a research program par excellence in the.
