Processing Definite Determiners: Formal Semantics Meets Experimental Results

Experiments on the online processing of linguistic utterances provide information about language processing in the first instance, and only indirectly about linguistic knowledge, while it has been linguistic knowledge, and not linguistic processing, that has been the subject matter of theoretical linguistics. So how can such evidence be relevant to theoretical linguistics? Or how can linguistic theory inform a theory of language processing? - This issue is discussed here with respect to the processing and the formal semantics of the English definite determiner. I argue that the meaning of the definite determiner, as it shows up in experiments on online comprehension, can actually be accounted for in an incremental variant of current formal semantics.