摘要：There is a widespread consensus among semanticists that borderline cases of vague predicates can be suitably characterized by applying a definiteness operator. It is not hard to realize, however, that such operators give rise to semantic and logical difficulties, when introduced into the object language. The line of thought presented in this paper differs significantly from the traditional approach in two ways. First, it offers a new definition for the phenomenon of borderlineness. Second, it points out that the difficulties generated by the definiteness operator could not possibly be solved without recourse to the problem of linguistic data
关键词：indeterminate extension; definiteness operator; asymmetric definition; problem of data
