Definite possessives and discourse novelty

Standard wisdom holds that in order for a use of a definite description to be felicitous, its referent must be 'familiar,' either because it was menti oned in previous discourse or because it is otherwise salient in the non-li nguistic context. I show that a grammatically-defined class of demonstrably definite NPs containing definite possessors (e.g., that man's daughter) ar e routinely able to describe novel (unfamiliar) entities. I propose to acco unt for this systematic class of exceptions to the standard familiarity req uirement by providing a refined notion of familiarity, one that determines when a use of a possessed NP as a whole will count as familiar based (in pa rt) on whether its possessor phrase counts as familiar.