The Specificity Condition as Crossover

This paper proposes that the specificity condition is an instance of crossover, by appealing to the semantics of definite/specific DPs: since indexical values assigned to the determiners of definite/specific DPs depend on the value of the Wh-variable within the domains of such DPs, their values are offending to the operator-variable chain formed by the Wh-phrase. The data about DP-internal A-scrambling in Japanese, which repairs the ill-formedness of the specificity condition, support this analysis, although their grammaticality is not predicted by any previous analysis.