 The motivation for this idea would be as follows. Very few natural languages have what we would recognize as definite and indefinite descriptions. In most Asian and Slavic languages, for example, ‘the man’ and ‘a man’ would both be expressed in the same way—in the determiner-free equivalent of ‘man’. Perhaps it is just our infatuation with surface grammatical form that leads us to think that English or Italian really has two different logical elements corresponding to surface forms ‘the’ and ‘a’. Perhaps there is a single logical element (or perhaps just a free variable) with different pragmatic application conditions. That is, perhaps ‘the’ and ‘a’ have the same literal meaning—i.e., for both ‘An F is G’ and ‘The F is G’ the literal semantics is exhausted by the interpretation that [∃x: Fx](Gx) receives in a standard truth-conditional semantics. A number of linguists and philosophers have entertained this idea in recent years, including Kempson (1975), Breheney (1999), Szabó (2000), Zvolensky (1997), Ludlow and Segal (2003) and a version of the idea is at least considered in Heim (1982) and Kamp and Reyle (1993).