ISSN 0167-5133
Volume 5, Number 3, 1986/87
JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY ST...
11 downloads
510 Views
4MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
ISSN 0167-5133
Volume 5, Number 3, 1986/87
JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE SEMANTICS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE MANAGING EDITOR:
Peter Bosch
EDITORIAL BOARD:
Simon C. Garrod Leo G.M. Noordman Pieter A.M. Seuren
REVIEW EDITOR:
Rob A. van der Sandt
ASSISTANT EDITOR:
Bart Geurts
CONSULTING EDITORS: J. Allwood (Univ. Goteborg), R. Bartsch (Amsterdam Univ.), J. van Benthem (Amsterdam Univ.), D.S. Bree (Erasmus Univ. Rotterdam), H.E. Brekle (Univ. Regensburg), G. Brown (Univ. of Essex), H.H. Clark (Stanford Univ.), H.-J. Eikmeyer (Univ. Bielefeld), G. Fauconnier (Univ. de Vincennes), J. Hintikka (Florida State Univ.), J. Hobbs (SRI, Menlo Park), St. Isard (Sussex Univ.), D. Israel (SRI, Stanford), P.N. Johnson-Laird (MRC Appl. Psych. Unit, Cambridge), E. Keenan (UCLA),
W. Levelt (Max Planck Inst. Nijmegen), J. Lyons (Trinity Hall, Cambridge), W. Marslen-Wilson (Max Planck Inst. Nijmegen), J. McCawley (Univ. Chicago), 6 . Dahl (Stockholm Univ.), B. Richards (Edinburgh Univ.), R. Rommetveit (Oslo Univ.), H. Schnelle (Ruhr Univ. Bochum), J. Searle (Univ. Cal. Berkeley), A. von Stechow (Univ. Konstanz), M. Steedman (Edinburgh Univ.), Ch. Travis (McGill Univ.), Z. Vendler (UCSD), Y. Wilks (New Mexico State Univ.), D. Wilson (UCL).
EDITORIAL ADDRESS: Journal of Semantics, P.O. Box 1454, 6501 BL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Published by Foris Publications, P.O. Box 509,3300 AM Dordrecht,The Netherlands. © N.I.S. Foundation ISSN 0167-5133 Printed in the Netherlands by ICG Printing
Law and Philosophy An International Journal for Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy Editor Alan Mabe, Dept. of Philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA Law and Philosophy is a forum for work in law and philosophy which is of common interest to members of the two disciplines of Jurisprudence and Legal Philosphy. It is open to all approaches in both fields and to work in any of the major legal traditions- common law, civil law, or the socialist tradition. The editors encourage papers which exhibit philosophical reflection on the law informed by a knowledge of the law, and legal analysis informed by philosophical methods and principles. Among others, the following topics are dealt with: theories of law, justice and law, morality and the law, legal validity, the nature of law and legal systems, punishment and responsibility, adjudication, legal reasoning, obligation and disobedience, professional ethics, epistemological issues involved in evidence and procedure, philosophical investigations of conceptual and foundational questions in law and legal systems, the impact of legal developments on philosophy, the relations of law and legal institutions to other social institutions, the relation of legal and political theory, the economic dimension of issues in jurisprudence and legal philosophy, the nature and development of legal concepts, and exploration of problems in particular areas of the law. Subscription Information ISSN 0167-5249 1988, Vol. 7 (3 issues) Institutional rate: Dfl. 218.00/US $103.00 incl. postage/handling Private rate: Dfl. 86.00/US $36.00 incl. postage/handling Private subscriptions should be sent direct to the publishers D. Reidel Publishing Company
Kluwer Academic Publishers P O Box 989. 3300 AZ Dordrcch!. The Netherlands 101 Philip Drive, Norwell. MA 02061. U.S.A.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS Journal of the Research Committee on Sociolinguistics of the International Sociological Association
Editors
John Driessen, Montana, USA and Tony Hak, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Aims and Scope
Sociolinguistics strives to be a bulletin regarding work in progress dealing with the study of language involvements in society, rather than a repository for complete work. Contributions are typically written in English with occasional French and Spanish articles. Subscription Information ISSN 0049-1217 1988, volume 17 (2 issues) Institutions/Libraries Individual rate Postage/Handling
Dfl. 62.50 Dfl. 40.00 Dfl. 13.00
Deliveries within the Netherlands are subject to the addition of 6% BTW (VAT) FORIS PUBLICATIONS HOLLAND/USA Publishers/Booksellers FORIS PUBLICATIONS HOLLAND \*)
P.O. Box 509, 3300 AM Dordrecht, The Netherlands - tel. (0)78-510454 or
FORIS PUBLICATIONS USA, Inc. P.O. Box 5904, Providence, Rl 02903 - tel. (401)232-2722
JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS Volume 5, Number 3
CONTENTS
LINDA M. MOXEY and ANTHONY J. SANFORD, Quantifiers and Focus
189
ANTON J. SMOLENAARS and ALEX J.H. SCHUTZELAARS, On 'Cognitive' Semantics of Emotion Words: Solomon Quasi-Ecologically Tested 207
Discussion FRANCIS CORNISH, Anaphoric Pronouns: Under Linguistic Control or Signalling Particular Discourse Representations?
233
Bookreviews JAMES D. McCAWLEY, Pieter A.M. Seuren, Discourse Semantics
261
MAURICE VLIEGEN, Klaus Robering, Sehens
268
Die deutschen Verben des
FORIS PUBLICATIONS HOLLAND/USA
SCOPE OF THIS JOURNAL The JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS publishes articles, notes, discussions, and book reviews in the area of natural language semantics. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, in that it aims at an integration of philosophical, psychological, and linguistic semantics as well as semantic work done in artificial intelligence and anthropology. Contributions must be of good quality (to be judged by at least two referees) and should relate to questions of comprehension and interpretation of sentences or texts in natural language. The editors welcome not only papers that cross traditional discipline boundaries, but also more specialized contributions, provided they are accessible to and interesting for a wider readership. Empirical relevance and formal correctness are paramount among the criteria of acceptance for publication. INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS Typescripts for publication should be sent in 3 copies to the managing editor. They should be typed on A4 (or similar format), one-sided, double spaced, and with a wide margin and must be accompanied by an approx. 200 words summary. Footnotes and bibliographical references must appear at the end of the typescript. Diagrams must be submitted camera-ready. All papers submitted are subject to anonymous refereeing. Authors receive 20 offprints of their published articles and 10 offprints of their published reviews, free of charge. Larger numbers can be supplied at cost price by advance arrangement. Unless special arrangements have been made, copyright rests with the NIS Foundation. PRICES AND CONDITIONS OF SUBSCRIPTION The JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS appears in four issues per year of approx. 100 pages each. Subscriptions for private use are available at the reduced rate of Dfl. 64,— per year; the institution rate is Dfl. 160,—. The price for single issues is Dfl. 38,—. Postage Dfl. 13,— per volume. Airmail- and SAL-ratesare available on request. We regret that no delivery can take place before payment has been received. Subscriptions not cancelled before October 1st automatically extend to the following year. Placement of orders implies the consent of the subscriber to these conditions. All orders should be sent to Foris Publications, P.O. Box 509, 3300 AM Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Journal of Semantics 5: 189-206
QUANTIFIERS AND FOCUS LINDA M. MOXEY and ANTHONY J. SANFORD
ABSTRACT
This paper is an investigation of the patterns of focus associated with a number of English quantifiers. Our claim is that the focus pattern varies with quantifier, and that this is reflected in, and indicated by, reference patterns and the kind of propositions which are naturally associated with the quantifiers. To the extent that this is shown to be the case, it can be argued that the meaning of quantifiers must include some treatment of the focus patterns to which they give rise. Following the introduction, in which some of the general properties of the quantifiers to be examined are laid out, a number of sentence continuation tasks are reported which directly test the focus claim. Finally, some speculations are made regarding the relations of our observations to other properties of the terms used. As a prototype problem for the mental representation of a quantified statement, consider the sentence "Some artists are beekeepers". A logically adequate model of this statement would require a representation of what is logically possible, and what is logically necessary. For instance, it is usually
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
This paper concerns a neglected but potentially important aspect of natural language quantifiers. Certain quantifiers serve to identify various proportions of sets. Thus few, for example, identifies a smaller proportion of a set than many. However, different quantifiers may serve to identify similar proportions, yet produce somewhat different representations when they are used. The distinction between few and a few is considered in some detail, along with related expressions. It is claimed that these expressions serve to put into focus different subsets of the supersets upon which they operate. It was suspected that while afew X do / p u t s emphasis on the small subset of X of which "do Y" is true (the "refset"), with/ew X do Y, emphasis is put on that large, complement, subset of which "do Y" is taken to be not true. This suspected difference in emphasis is revealed by considering the acceptability of pronominal reference in subsequent sentences to the set partitions which result from using these quantifiers. In order to test these tentative observations, a large number of subjects was examined using a sentence continuation procedure. This allowed for a detailed analysis of the preferred patterns of anaphoric reference to subsets partitioned by quantifiers. The major conclusions were that few, very few, and not many put emphasis on the complement set, while a few and only a few put emphasis on the refset. Furthermore, the pattern of continuation content was markedly different for these two groups. Additional results are described in which it is shown how connectives influence this picture. It is argued that quantifiers not only identify different proportions, but that they differentially emphasize the subsets which they generate, and can function as "comments" on these proportions. Possible theoretical relations with negativity and affectivity are discussed.
190
Representing small proportions Our concern here is to apply this line of argument to quantifiers which serve to signal small proportions, specifically a few, only a few, very few,few, and not many. Notwithstanding arguments to the effect that a few and only a few may not denote proportions, they are certainly used by people to describe situations where proportional information is available (Moxey 1986; Moxey and Sanford in preparation), and so must figure in any adequate discussion of the depiction of small proportions of things. Because the expressions vary in kind and complexity, we shall use the blanket term quantity expression to refer to the set. Outside of proportional denotations, there are at least two ways in which the above quantity expressions vary: "Comment" functions At first glance, not only do the expressions with which we are concerned serve to single out small proportions of things, but they serve different rhetorical functions. For instance, only a few has the appearance of a comment on the small number identified, perhaps indicating that more might have been expected. A similar argument applies to few, which also serves to draw attention to the small proportion being depicted. In contrast, a few seems to serve as a straightforward introduction of a small proportion or number into
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
taken that "a/ least one artist is a beekeeper" (logical necessity) must be in the model, as must the possibility of there being artists who are not beekeepers, and beekeepers which are not artists. A lesser model would allow erroneous deductive reasoning. Many other (nonlogical) quantifiers require at least this much information to describe the models which might represent them, including most, many, few, and a few} to represent these one needs at least that described for some, with added constraints on the proportion of a set which they might be taken as denoting, etc. Looked at from the point of view of discourse, there is an additional complication: what should be included in mental (discourse model) representations? For instance, to return to the example "Some artists are beekeepers", does the mental representation resulting from encountering this sentence include the possible group of beekeepers who are not artists? In terms of discourse processing resulting from using the quantifier some, is it likely that processing will be aimed at detecting references concerning such a subset of a logical model? Similarly, in a mental representation resulting from our example, do we expect to find the possibility that all artists are beekeepers? We suspect not, since in ordinary discourse, it would be in violation of Grice's (1975) maxims to say "some" when one meant "all", or "at least some and maybe all". In short, it seems quite possible that what is needed for a logically adequate model, and what is usually in the mental representation for discourse purposes are likely not the same thing.2
191 the arena of discourse. Finally, not many explicitly comments on the small number or proportion being introduced. Negativity These quantity expressions differ in other ways too. For example, the application of a tag question (Klima 1964) shows the quantity expressions in (l)-(3) to be negative, while (4) and (5) are positive: Few of the guests enjoyed the party, did they?
(2)
Very few of the guests enjoyed the party, did they?
(3)
Not many of the guests enjoyed the party, did they?
(4)
A few of the guests enjoyed the party, didn't they?
(5)
Only a few of the guests enjoyed the party, didn't they?
Example (5) sounds a little strained. Perhaps this is because only indicates something about the number of guests who are expected lo enjoy the party, so that a tag question, whether negative or positive, implies that the reader is being asked about the writer's expectations. Whatever the reason for the strain, (6) shows that only a few is by no means negative: (6)*
Only a few of the guests enjoyed the party, did they?
Focal subsets Now let us consider how these expressions might be represented in a mental model of discourse. What aspects of the potential range of necessary and possible relations are available, or in focus, in the representation? One linguistic test of which entities are in focus as a result of encountering a piece of discourse is to check whether or not the entities may be referred to by means of a pronominal anaphor (e.g. Chafe 1972; Sanford and Garrod 1981). And there are certain obvious differences amongst our set of expressions looked at in this way. Compare the following: (7)
A few of the children ate their ice-cream. They ate the strawberry flavour first.
(8)*
A few of the children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead.
In the case of (7), the pronoun they refers to the set of children who ate their
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(1)
192 ice-cream (call this the refset). In contrast, they in (8) refers to the set of children who did not eat their ice-cream, a reading which we have forced, for illustration, by using the word instead. This reference to the complement subset (or compset), is clearly not acceptable in (8). The pattern is quite different when the quantity expression is changed to few, in that the compset references seem to become acceptable: (9)
Few of the children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead.
(10)
? Few of the children ate their ice-cream. They ate the strawberry flavour first.
The authors' intuitions are that the reference in (10) is extremely strained though perhaps not "ungrammatical" as (8) was considered to be, hence our use of ? rather than *. In summary, there is intuitive evidence that a few puts focus on the refset, and effectively precludes compset references, while few has an essentially opposite pattern, putting focus on the compset rather than on the refset. We will shortly turn to a more thorough investigation of these conjectures. Before this, it should be pointed out that simple tests like those described above seem to indicate that very few and not many behave like few. A particularly interesting case arises with only a few, which one might expect to behave like a few, but which does not seem to rule out the compset reference: (11)
Only a few of the children ate their ice-cream. They threw it around the room instead.
The next part of the paper is devoted to a number of empirical investigations of preferred focus patterns revealed through usage. Rather than rely entirely upon judgements of acceptability, our aim here is to see how the quantity expressions actually manipulate the (behavioural) state of focus of people who encounter them. To do this, a large number of subjects were presented with statements containing the quantity expressions of interest, and were invited to continue the theme set by writing the next part. For instance, this is a sample material: (12)
Only a few MPs were at the meeting. T h e y . . .
The subject would have to complete the second sentence here, and of course, what is of interest is the referent choice made for they under each condition.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
As before, the word instead forces a compset reading on they, but this time the result is acceptable. It is the refset configuration which is of dubious acceptability:
193 This should provide data on the focus pattern resulting from the quantity expressions. STUDY 1: PATTERNS BASED ON "FEW"
An initial study was carried out using the terms/ew, veryfew, only afew, and a few. Use of connectives in materials design
Few A few Only a few Very few
[football fans went to the match 1 I MP's went to the meeting I
and t h e y . . . They... but t h e y . . . because they
This gives 16 combinations for a single "scenario", 32 combinations in all. While the full-stop serves as a control, the connectives constrain continuations in various ways. There is no good a priori reason why and and but should alter focus, yet intuitively both of these seem to move reference onto the refset with/ew: (13)
Few of the football fans attended the match but they had a good time.
(14)
Few of the football fans attented the match and they caused a great deal of trouble.
In contrast, the connective because would appear to move things in the opposite direction: (15)
Few of the football fans attended the match because they watched it on television.
Given these complications, and the fact that the reference patterns which might be expected are likely to be a function of connective, the connectives were included as a factor in the design.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
In addition to looking at the patterns of completion brought about by the quantity expressions themselves, it is of interest to see in what ways the patterns depend upon connectives. Accordingly, the following combinations were used:
194 Method Materials and design There was a total of 32 different completions to be tested. Twenty subjects were to complete each material, requiring a total of 640 subjects, but a given subject only completed one continuation, to avoid contrast effects. The design is thus completly independent-group. Subjects
Procedure Each of the materials was typed onto a sheet of paper, such that there was only one material on a sheet. Each of the subjects was given only one sheet, and was requested to "complete the sentence presented so that it makes sense". Subjects were tested in groups of varying sizes. After the subjects had produced a continuation, they were presented with a second piece of paper, which required them to tick which of a potential field of referents for the pronoun they they had in mind when they produced the completion. The options were: (a) The MPs/fans who were at the meeting/match; (b) The MPs/fans who were not at the meeting/match; (c) MPs/fans in general; or (d) Other (in which event they were asked to specify). This was a precaution against undecidable continuations, and was deemed expedient on the basis of an earlier pilot study. Results In almost every case, the interpretation of the referent made by the experimenter either directly matched or was compatible with that marked down by the subjects. The few remaining cases, where the subjects' classification of intended reference appeared quite counterintuitive, are shown in the "other" column of Table 1. Because subsequent analysis shows the results to be uninfluenced by scenario, the data are collapsed over this factor. The referents of they selected under the 16 main conditions are shown in Table 1, and in general, the results show compset references to be most prevalent with veryfew, followed by few. A few only gave rise to compset references on two occasions. Only a few produced compset references only when combined with because. The refset references were treated to an analysis of variance based on the partitioning of Chi-square( Winer 1971) which showed a significant effect of
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Subjects mostly first year undergraduates at the University of Glasgow. No subject had any knowledge of what the test was for.
195 Table I: Frequencies of ref, comp and other intended referents of "they" in the continuations. Max score = 40 Quantifier
ref
comp
other
and but because
14 38 29 2
25 0 10 34
1 2 1 4
and but because
8 33 28 0
29 4 10 36
3 3 2 4
and but because
38 40 40 36
0 0 0 2
2 0 0 2
and but because
38 39 39 9
2 0 0 24
0 1 1 7
few
very few
a few
only a few
quantity expression (X2 = 42.3, df=3, p < .001), of connective (X2 = 59.09, df=3, p < .001), and of the interaction of these two, with X2 = 21.87, df=9, p < .01. These results can be thought of as representing the trends described earlier for the compset references since the scores are almost perfectly negatively related. Tests on the compset could not be made directly because of the number of zero scores. Numerous additional statistical tests were employed in order that valid claims could be made, but these are reported only as necessary. The most notable observation is that while few and very few lead to high percentages of compset references, compset references are by no means necessitated by these quantity expressions. The performance data thus suggest that while these two expressions may bias focus toward the compset, such a bias is not inevitable, and cannot be considered to be a "semantic" rule. In clear contrast, expression a few gives rise to compset continuations in only 2 (5%) of all instances. These two cases occur with the connective because, and it is this connective which gives rise to large numbers of compset continuations with only a few. This expression otherwise shows no tendency to lead to compset references. If one considers the full-stop as a "neutral" connective, and uses it as a reference point, the data may be summarized in the following way. The expression/ew biases people toward the compset, and this tendency is marginally enhanced by the intensifier very (although this is not a statistically reliable effect). In contrast, afew and only afew put focus on the refset. This is
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Connective
196
Continuing discussion and further analyses Perhaps the most general comment to be made is that the "negative" quantity expressions seem to lead to compset references, and the "positive" ones to refset references. However, much of this is merely a tendency and not a rule, especially in the case of the negative instances. Under the full-stop condition, few gave rise to compset references on only 63% of occasions - in other words, few only allows compset references, it does not require them. Similar arguments apply to very few where the tendency appears to be slightly enhanced. Thus compset/refset foci must be considered tendencies rather than be required. Comparable data with "not many" It might be argued that in some way at present impossible to define, few is more weakly negative than its explicitly negative counterpart not many, and that the latter would always lead to compset focus. A supplementary experiment was carried out using precisely the desing above except that the quantity expression was not many. This appeared in configurations with the two scenarios and the four connectives - i.e., 8 conditions. A given subject saw only one configuration, as before. Twelve subjects saw each configuration, making a total of 96 subjects. After completing the continuation, each subject answered the questionnaire on the referent of they as before. The results of this study are shown in Table 2. The pattern of results is very similar to that obtained forfew, which is shown in brackets for comparison. Under the full-stop condition, not many produces 79% compset continuations. This number falls with and and but, and very slightly with because. An analysis of variance based on Chi-square showed the effect of connective to be reliable (X2 = 36.52, df = 3, p 1 0 0 0 0 1 3
0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 1 1 0 1
0 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 0 0 0 3 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 0
25.
VO
220 Table 4. Independence of indices; product-moment correlation (Kendall's tau)
relevance efficacy suitability
efficacy
suitability
adequacy
0.051(0.113)
-0.246 (-0.199) -0.420 (-0.359)
0.042(0.129) 0.736(0.585) 0.216 (0.042)
Table 5. Scenarios ranked with respect to relevance; i.e. the negative of the total number of irrelevant words chosen 0 0 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -2 -2 -2
hot tempered sulky mad
angered jealous insulted offended malcontent angry indignant
-2 -2 -2 -2 -3 -3 -4 -4 -4 -5
the first seven scenarios in Table 5 are strongly relevant and that the last 4 scenarios clearly fall short of general relevance. In Table 6 we have ranked the scenarios with respect to efficacy: the frequency of choice of the intended word minus the maximum frequency among the 'wrong' words. Table 6. Scenarios ranked with respect to relevance; i.e. the frequency of choice of the intended word minus the maximal frequency among 'wrong' words jealous annoyed envious sulky peevish bearing hatred indignant malcontent embittered insulted
12 7 4 3 2 2 1 1
0 -1
aggrieved hot tempered angered angry aggravated offended piqued mad
displeased furious
-1 -2 -2 -3 -3 -4 -4 -5 -7 -7
Consider the strange behavior of jealous: having a weak general relevance (Table 5), with respect to efficacy it is superior to all others. This suggests there is something special about "jealous", notably that it is not at its right place within this semantic field. (In Section 4.3 we will work out this sug-
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
displeased annoyed embittered peevish bearing hatred aggrieved envious furious piqued aggravated
221
gestion). As to the other scenarios, the results of their efficacy are disappointing: the maximum score is 20, but except for the bizarre jealous, no scenario comes even halfway up to this score. Worse, for more than half of the scenarios the score is negative, implying that the maximum unanimity is not at the intended word. When it comes to 'focal' adequacy, our specification of Solomon's theory clearly does not pass a reasonable test. All will thus depend on 'diffuse' adequacy: suitability, i.e. the degree to which the 'wrong' words that some scenario 'attracted' are related to the intended word. Table 7. Scenarios ranked with respect to suitability, i.e. over all the 'wrong' words that are chosen for a scenario: the mean number of features in common with the intended word
offended malcontent piqued displeased angry indignant angered insulted embittered
7.15 7.06 7.00 6.62 6.17 5.83 5.70 5.50 4.22 3.71
being hatred furious aggravated peevish sulky mad
annoyed jealous envious hot tempered
When we defined suitability we saw that, in order to determine the maximum and minimum value, we needed to know whether there are actually any word pairs with 0 or 16 features in common. We now can generalize this somewhat to the statement that in order to evaluate the suitability of a scenario, i.e. assessing whether some mean number of common features represents 'much' or 'few', we need the actual distribution of common features over all ((20 x 19)/2 =) 190 word pairs. Table 8. Distribution of common features over (20 x 19)/2 = 190 word pairs; left: number of common features; right: cumulative frequency (top to bottom) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
2 9 31 54 81 103 120 142 154
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 (17
173 180 182 186 189 190 190 190
200)
Note: the last row at the right presents the fact that every word has 17 features in common with itself, as there are 17 attributes.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
10.46 9.07 8.77 8.61 8.45 8.13 8.00 7.94 7.43 7.23
aggrieved
222
Table 9. Scenarios ranked with respect to adequacy, i.e. over all words that are chosen for a scenario: the mean number of features in common with the intended word jealous aggrieved annoyed envious embittered malcontent bearing hatred peevish indignant sulky
14.29 12.53 11.35 10.95 10.32 10.31 10.26 9.89 9.80 9.78
offended insulted angry piqued displeased angered aggravated furious mad
hot tempered
9.56 9.12 8.69 8.61 8.45 8.44 8.11 7.06 5.83 4.44
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
We counted the number of common features for each word pair and tabulated the cumulative results in Table 8. There are 2 pairs with 0 features in common, 9 pairs with 1 feature or less, 186 pairs with 12 features or less, and so on. We see that suitability varies from 0 to 14 (all 190 pairs have 14 features or less in common). Table 8 shows that, loosely speaking, pairs with 5 or more common features are above the median (in the 'upper half of the distribution: 190/2 = 95 pairs are somewhere between 4 and 5) and that pairs with 9 or more common features are in the upper 10 per cent, or 10th decile (the upper 10 per cent, or 19 pairs, is demarcated somewhere between 8 and 9 features). If we now compare Tables 7 and 8 we get a picture that is different from the picture we got for efficacy: approximately 18 out of the 20 scenarios are above the median, while there are 7 and 2 scenarios in the 9th and 10th decile respectively. So, the suitability of the scenarios, the 'diffuse' adequacy, seems, on the whole, to be not as disappointing as the 'focal' adequacy, efficacy. We refrain from commenting upon specific scenarios, as this would not be very revealing here; moreover, the distributions parallel to Table 8 for individual scenarios are not identical. The last index is adequacy: the over-all measure that indicates the degree to which a scenario 'attracts' words related to the intended word, the intended word itself included. This inclusion of the intended word implies that, in the evaluation, we must gather the common features of each word with itself. Consequently, we consider ((20 x 20)/2 =) 200 word pairs, including some 'pairs' that have 17 features in common (at each of the 17 attributes). This extension of Table 8 is represented between parentheses at the bottom line on the right; accordingly, the median and deciles get somewhat different values. If we compare the adequacies - Table 9 - to this frame the result is downright positive: more than half of the scenarios within the 9th or 10th decile. One can summarize the situation as follows: in general the fit seems to be
223
moderately satisfactory, although the semantic relation between scenarios and words is more diffuse than was intended, or, for that matter, desirable. 4.3. Local deficiencies
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The fit between the theory and our data is only moderate. In particular, we find a lack of focality, with no dramatic difference between scenarios. This suggests that there is some essential deficit that pervades the whole structure and that we will call 'global'. Before exploring it, we will pay some attention to potential 'local' deficits, which are not necessarily absent. It is hard to see how the global deficit could have been brought in during the semantic specification and the construction of the scenarios, i.e. phases (1) and (2) from Figure 2. It is, on the other hand, obvious how 'shallow' deficits could have arisen there: some semantic specification could be simply inept in some respect, there could have been an awkward implementation within the scenarios. All this involves features, and, consequently, we can characterize the 'constructor's noise' ((1) and (2) in Fig. 2) as 'feature-bound', i.e. it will be tied to specific features. Awkwardness as to all features is extremely implausible, keeping in mind the results for suitability and adequacy, and could hardly be called 'local' or 'shallow'. It would, on the other hand, make no sense to connect this feature-bound inadequacy to Solomon's theory, as the latter gives no actual complete specification of our displeasure words and, of course, has no commitment whatsoever to the scenarios. To explore feature-specific involvement with the adequacy of the scenarios we should scrutinize the individual features in this respect. We argued like this: whenever a feature manifests some specific peculiarity it will make a difference to adequacy whether a scenario contains that feature or not. Accordingly, we made for each feature a partition of scenarios: those with vs. those without it, and computed the point biserial coefficient of correlation (Walker & Lev 1953:262) with an adequacy index. These are product moment correlations, and accordingly we can take the following line of reasoning. Let us say that a 'shared variance' of 20 per cent or more would be a clear indication of 'feature peculiarity'; this corresponds to an absolute value of .45 or more for the coefficient. There are 75 features and 4 indices of adequacy; from these 4 x 75 = 300 coefficients only 35 (about 12 per cent) meet the criterion. Taking into account that, because of the restricted number of features within one attribute, a high correlation with some feature tends to effect, artefactually, a low correlation with another feature within the same attribute and vice versa, and that indices are mutually correlated, we can reasonably infer that the feature-specific contribution to the adequacy of the scenarios, i.e. the scope of the 'constructor's noise' (viz. that of transitions (1) and (2) from Figure 2) is rather restricted. Hence it does not make much sense to try and reduce the moderate general fit to it.
224
5. EXPLORING GLOBAL DEFICITS
5.7. General There are two different ways of constraining the boundless notion of 'global deficits'. The first is substantial: from (alternative) theoretical considerations some clues arise as to potential defects of the theory that may be crucial to its malfunctioning. In the end, of course, a quite different, and hopefully better, theory should be constructed, leading to comparative testing; but before that, as we will see, also more modest explorations around such topics are feasible. The second way of constraining the notion of 'global deficits' could be called 'empirical': here the divergence between theory and data is captured by comparing some relevant global and formal characteristics of each. In this section we will give one specimen of the first approach and two of the second. All are successful in the sense that they do shed some light on the peculiarities of Solomon's theory which hampered the fit. 5.2. Substantial We have a clear substantial clue as to where Solomon's theory falls short.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
There is another potential 'local deficit', also due to awkwardness of the 'constructor', but not located within the semantic description or the scenarios. We alluded to it in Section 4.2. a propos "jealous": an unbalanced semantic field, or the presence of outliers within an otherwise homogenous collection of words. We can suspect such an outlier to have a relatively poor relevance, good efficacy, and poor suitability. Although it may thus hamper as well as foster the over-all impression of fit, we must admit that it does both in a rather 'unfair' way, and hence in general, it has a debilitating effect on the testing procedure. This second kind of 'local deficit' does not turn out to be substantial either. We computed for each pair of words i,j an (ordinal) 'dissimilarity index', djj, simply by counting the number of features that they do not have in common. Not only is "jealous" not an outlier in the formal sense that d; ;ea|0US > dy for all i and for any non-outlier j (Tversky and Hutchinson 1986) (in fact, there are no formal outliers at all), but if we rank the words as to their mean dissimilarity to all other words, "jealous" ends up in 8th position. So the impression given in the beginning of this section is reinforced: there is no good reason for suspecting that the moderate, diffuse fit may be due to 'local deficits'; it is global defects that must be responsible.
225
Table 10. Concepts ranked with respect to situation bias: the number of subjects - out of 22 - that chose 'situation features' as being the most salient category in the definition of the concept envious aggrieved malcontent jealous insulted displeased annoyed offended piqued aggravated
20 17 17 17 16 16 13 13 12 11
sulky embittered indignant peevish bearing hatred mad
angered angry hot tempered furious
10 9 8 7 6 3 3 2 1 0
According to the criticism just mentioned there should be a positive relation between this index and the adequacies of the scenario; Table 11 gives the relevant coefficients. As there is a substantial positive relationship between situation bias and adequacy, we must conclude that the criticism of 'esotericism' with respect to Solomon's theory has some point. Note that, according to Table 11, the Table II. Product-moment correlation (Kendall's tau) of situation-bias (Table 10) and earlier indices. All values are positive relev
eff
suit
adeq
0.101 (0.077)
0.394 (0.256)
0.181 (0. 139)
0.680 (0.449)
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
A rival theory, viz. Frijda's (1987), describes emotions and, accordingly, emotion words, by means of intrinsically different kinds of features: (a) aspects of the situation, for instance [some moral value being violated], (b) action tendencies ['I feel like hitting him'] and (c) arousal ['my heart beats into my throat']. As, according to this theory, all three kinds of features are necessary for the semantics, and as Solomon virtually neglects categories (b) and (c), the global deficiency could be just there. From this viewpoint Solomon's semantics is "esoteric" (Frijda, personal communicatiaon). As emotions, and emotion words, are not homogeneous as to the necessity or saliency of the three kinds of features, it follows, if this criticism is correct, that Solomon's semantics will do better for words that are biased towards the situation-features than for others. Twenty-two subjects - different from those in Section 2 - indicated for our twenty concepts which of the three kinds of features they would judge to be the most salient. We take the number of subjects that decided for category (a) as an index for situation bias of the concept; Table 10 ranks them accordingly.
226 'esotericism' has more to do with the 'focused' aspects of the fit (efficacy) than with the diffuse ones (suitability), with which it is virtually unrelated. This is compatible with the alternative theory: with a 'bad' scenario, viz. one which should have action features but does not, features do 'come through' (suitability is not corrupted) but are insufficient to identify the relevant word (efficacy is corrupted). 5.5. Empirical
Table 12. Hyponymy relations within the data, (left) is a hyponym of (right). Those with a ' + ' are considered plausible insulted angered sulky hot tempered hot tempered offended piqued indignant indignant indignant
displeased piqued peevish aggravated mad displeased displeased piqued malcontent displeased
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
We have two leads into the formal comparison of theory and data. The first is linguistic: within a rather restricted semantic field, like that of our displeasure terms, the question arises whether we are concerned with a set of words that is homogeneous as to semantic specificity, or whether some of the words are hierarchically related by hyponymy or semantic inclusion, like the pair "red" - "scarlet" (Lyons 1969:453 ff). Inspection of Table 1 suggests that there is quite a bit of room for relations of this kind. Detection of the, asymmetric, hyponymy relation within the semantics simply follows the definition (Lyons I.e.): a word a is a hyponym of a word b whenever (1) there is at least one attribute such that b has the neutral ('irrelevant') feature and a has not, and (2) a equals b with regard to the remaining attributes. On the other hand, it must be possible to have an analogous asymmetry between two terms within our data, considering - sticking to the example above - that, within our procedure it is more likely that "scarlet" is picked for the scenario red than vice versa, as the subject fits the words onto the scenario, and "scarlet" 'satisfies' the description red, so to speak, but the opposite is definitely not true. Working this out we detect no relations of hyponymy in the semantic description, but we do find 10 hyponymy relations in the data of which 5 are clearly plausible. These results are in Table 12.
227
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Looking into the semantic descriptions, we find out that it is relatively easy to adapt the specifications there to comply with the hyponymy, in a simple and plausible way, and without deep effect. Relating these adaptations to Solomon's original text, it is fair to conclude that the theory is somewhat over-specific or over-meticulous for some attributes. Our second lead into the formal comparison of theory and data comes from so-called 'nearest neighbour analysis' (Tversky and Hutchinson 1986), which may be summed up, simplifying considerably, as saying that the computation of a meaningful index of 'dissimilarity' among the elements of a set of psychological entities enables one - using only the ordinal (rank) properties of these dissimilarities - to do the following things, among others: - Diagnose whether the set of elements can be formally represented as locations within a multidimensional space (whatever the number of dimensions of this space); if not, algorithms that establish such a location are a priori senseless: an adequate formal representation must be of a different character, hierarchical, or more 'discrete', for instance. - To spot local foci and global foci, respectively, i.e. elements that are the 'center' of some sub-region of the set, and pairs of elements that 'behave' as a focus with regard to the other elements. - To spot outliers; elements that are 'marginal' to the structure. First, computation of a 'dissimilarity index' is simple both for the semantic description and the data. For the former we take the number of features that two words do not have in common; as for the latter, we base the dissimilarity between scenarios a and b on the sum of absolute differences between n(a,x) and n(b,x), where the variable x ranges over all words (the irrelevant words that were used to estimate the relevance of the scenarios are 'packed into one' in this computation: it would lead to artefacts if we led them out, but it would be illogical to give them a definite semantic role here). Applying 'nearest neighbour analysis' to these sets of dissimilarities leads to the following synopsis of results. - The semantic description could be represented multidimensionally, the empirical dissimilarities definitively could not. In general the data seem to be more 'realistic' in this respect, especially if we take our sets of terms to include 'superordinates'. In this case multidimensional representations tend to become unlikely (Tversky and Hutchinson, 1986), intuitively as well as formally. - Some hyponymy relations from Table 12 show up again as global foci within the data. The semantic description reveals some global foci that are neither clear hyponyms nor plausible as pairs of foci (in Dutch). Since hyponymy pairs that behave like pairs of global foci in nearest analysis is exactly what one should expect, the data again seem to play a more realistic role than the theory.
228
6. CONCLUSION
There is obviously no tight frame of reference to evaluate Solomon's theory as such. Only in contrast to other semantic theories for the same domain could we explore its adequacy sufficiently. Nevertheless, we can conclude that the fit in this quasi-ecological setting is too diffuse and hence only moderately satisfactory. It is unlikely that this deficiency could be reduced to relatively shallow 'constructor's noise'; it is more likely that global defects of the theory are at stake. It could well be that one of those is 'esotericism', i.e. too little concern for 'action-tendencies' and 'arousal'. This and other defects are in the same vein: The theory tends to become over-meticulous in its semantic specification, as revealed by the analysis of hyponymy. Nearest neighbor analysis points to an over-formality, favoring simplified formal representations, as well as non-colloquial language use. Psychological Laboratory University of Amsterdam Weesperplein 8 1018 XA Amsterdam The Netherlands
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
— The semantic dissimilarities show a formal local focus, "malcontent", the data dissimilarities tend to give "angered" that position. Now, the Dutch equivalent of "malcontent", "misnoegd", from a formal, grammatical point of view is indeed the most generic term of displeasure within our set, so in this respect the semantic representation is undoubtedly correct. (Note that in Section 4.2 there was some concern about the word bias of "malcontent": it was the word with some tendency to be used with the nonsense scenario; it seems plausible that whenever 'one cannot make sense of it', subjects take the formally most generic term). Colloquially, however, there is a clear tendency to use the equivalent of "angered", i.e. "boos", as a generic term of displeasure, with applications that are broader than its strictly grammatical description. In summary, then, it appears that we should interpret the results of the nearest neighbor analysis in the following way: the Solomon semantics tends to become too formal, and the empirical results are more realistic. As to the qualification 'formal', we distinguish two senses here: (1) entailing a simplified formal model, that, in general, has turned out not to be the optimal form of representation, and (2) adhering more to formal, 'correct' language than to colloquial use.
229 REFERENCES
APPENDIX 1: EXAMPLE OF A SEMANTIC DESCRIPTION In illustration we shall give an example of a meaning-analysis of angry (adjective), anger (noun). The content of each attribute will be elucidated below: SCOPE/OBJECT: We must distinguish between the target of an emotion (i.e. the person with whom one is angry) and the (intentional) object of an emotion. As for the object of anger: Of course we can be angry at the malfunctioning of a television set, or angry that the newspaper has not been delivered. As a rule however, we are angry at the behaviour, attitude, stupidity, carelessness, irresponsibility etc. of a. person (or group of persons). Therefore anger has a rather narrow scope. An emotion has a narrow scope if and only if its object must pertain to human attributes and characteristics. For instance, one can only envy what one looks upon as belonging to another person (or personified object), and one can only be indignant because of human behaviour, attitudes etc. Henceforth we shall refer to the person who experiences an emotion (anger, envy, etc.) as the experiencer of the emotion. FOCUS: Anger focuses on the actions of another person (target), not on the person himself (this would be the case for hatred). DIRECTION: Anger has typically an outward direction. Of course, one may be angry with oneself, but this is not the typical (prototypical) case of being angry. Furthermore, in being angry with oneself, there is neither a desire to get satisfaction nor a desire to punish (pathological cases apart). CRITERIA: Anger has a touch of self-righteousness: Someone who is angry feels there is every reason to be angry, a fortiori to show himself angry (in contrast to such purely personal emotions as being peevish or envious, in which no moral criteria whatsoever are involved). On the other hand, someone who is angry has (unlike an indignant person) no moral criteria pure and simple for his judgments and evaluations of the target. An indignant person takes it for granted
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Frijda, N.H. 1987: The Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levelt, W.J.M. 1973: Formal Grammars in Linguistics and Psychology. Mouton, The Hague. Lyons, J. 1969: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ortony, A. 1987: Towards a cognitive theory of emotions. Lecture at the University of Amsterdam. Schutzelaars, A.J.H. 1986: Towards a semantics for emotion words. To be published. Schwartz, R.M. andT. Trabasso 1984: Children's understanding of emotions. In: C.E. Izard, J. Kagan and R.B. Zajonc (eds.), Emotions, Cognition and Behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 409-438. Solomon, R.C. 1977: The Passions, the Myth and Nature of Human Emotion. Anchor Books, Garden City, New York. Tversky, A. and J.W. Hutchinson 1986: Nearest neighbor analysis of psychological spaces. Psychological Review 93: 3—22. Walker, H.M. and J. Lev 1953: Statistical Inference. Holt, New York. Weiner, B. and S. Graham 1984: Cognition in emotion: concept and action. In: C.E. Izard, J. Kagan, and R.B. Zajonc (eds.), Emotions, cognition and behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 192-226.
230 that he is outraged for reasons of principle, not for any personal reasons. In sum, the criteria for the evaluations in anger are both moral and personal in character. STATUS: irrelevant.
POWER: Someone who is angry has a fair confidence in himself (has rather much power, as contrasted to someone who is malcontent or embittered etc.). EVALUATION OF PERSON: irrelevant.
APPENDIX 2: TWO SPECIMENS OF OUR SCENARIOS (Translation from the original Dutch) The scenario for "jealous": Emma Ten Cate and Frank Van Dale, who were both Members of Parliament, were on friendly terms. One day Emma had noticed that Frank associated with another person, viz. Anna De Bruyn. This occurrence occupied her mind for several weeks. Emma thought herself to be in a wretched situation, and she wondered how Frank stood towards her. She thought Frank unjust, as he didn't stick to the agreement that the two of them had made. Emma thought: 'It was not necessary for him to act that way. He ought to be ashamed of his conduct.' As Emma wanted to reprimand Frank, she didn't mince matters. She said in a rather unkind note: 'I won't allow your meeting Anna De Bruyn any longer. The scenario for "furious": Femke Van Dale, an elderly lady, and Emma Ten Cate were both waiting for the bus. Femke
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
EVALUATION OF ACTS: The acts of the target are deemed objectionable. EVALUATION OF THE SITUATION (in relation to oneself): irrelevant (experiencer does not feel miserable, as one who is sulky). RESPONSIBILITY: The experiencer holds the target responsible for what he has done (or has omitted to do, which amounts to the same thing). DESIRE PASSIVE: The experiencer wants the other to give him satisfaction. DESIRE ACTIVE: The experiencer wants to punish the other. With "anger" as a generic term, there are no implications as to the severity of the punishment. It may vary from mild reprimands and finger-wagging to giving the target a beating. BACKGROUND: With "angry" there is no presupposition as to how well the experiencer is acquainted with the target: background is irrelevant. COURSE: By this we understand the emotion's unfolding in time. At one extreme there are volatile emotions, like being annoyed or angry (or, rather, angered), that are shortlived (have a duration of a few minutes or less) and prone to cease swiftly in case they are misplaced (e.g. when one has no good reason to be angry, or when one is angry with the wrong person). At the other extreme there are massive emotions ("passions" is the appropriate term here) like hatred, resentment and embitterment that usually last for months, or even years, and are hard to overcome. INCLINATION: One who is angry is of course not kindly disposed but unfriendly towards the target. In hatred there is downright hostility on the part of the experiencer. OPENNESS: One who is angry is apt to make a clean breast of it, not to hold back his displeasure and grievances from the target. The frankness of anger is in sharp contrast to the stealthiness in envy on the one hand, and the reservedness that is typical of being offended on the other hand. CONNOTATION: "Angry" has no specific connotation, unlike most words for displeasure (//•relevant). Such words as "envious", "sulky", "peevish" and "hot tempered" have a negative connotation, there never being legitimate grounds for being "envious", "peevish" etc.
231 had never before talked with Emma. She recognized her, though, from the photograph in the local newspaper. For Emma had a column on 'etiquette' (titled 'How to behave in public') in this newspaper. When they boarded the bus, an occurrence took place that occupied Femke's mind for several minutes: Emma Ten Cate had taken the only seat that was still free. Femke took offence at this. She thought: 'How can she, of all persons, do such a thing? What about her 'good manners'?' As Femke thought that she was in the right, she wished that Emma give satisfaction to her. Femke felt self-assured and wanted to get even with Emma. She didn't mince matters, and she snarled out: 'This is a dirty trick! I am sick of you!' At that moment Femke didn't mind her private situation.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Journal of Semantics 5: 233-260
DISCUSSION ANAPHORIC PRONOUNS: UNDER LINGUISTIC CONTROL OR SIGNALLING PARTICULAR DISCOURSE REPRESENTATIONS? A contribution to the debate between Peter Bosch, and Liliane Tasmowski and Paul Verluyten
FRANCIS CORNISH ABSTRACT
0. INTRODUCTION
A debate has been taking place in this journal between Tasmowski and Verluyten (1982, 1985) (henceforth TV) on the one hand, and Bosch (1987) (henceforth B), on the other, regarding the essential nature of anaphoric pronouns and the most appropriate description of the anaphoric function which they make possible. TV's position is that there is a fundamental dichotomy between deictic pronouns, which do not require the addressee to (re-)construct a linguistic antecedent in order to arrive at a full interpretation, and non-deictic, anaphoric pronouns, which do require such a (re-)construction for a full interpretation to be achieved. The latter type consist of clitic (i.e. unstressed, non-independent) pronouns, whereas the former type are all stressed, disjunctive pronouns. There is no further sub-division to be drawn within the anaphoric pronoun category (as Bosch and others argue there is) between
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The article is a contribution to the debate between Tasmowski & Verluyten (1982, 1985) and Bosch (1983, 1984,1987) as to how the form as well as the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns is determined. TV rightly criticize B's tests as to whether a particular third-person pronoun is functioning semantico-syntactically or referential-anaphorically; however, their examples and arguments do not warrant the conclusion that there is no substantive distinction to be drawn between the two types of pronoun use. Many of TV's examples in this connection merit further analysis, which leads to very different conclusions from the ones they arrive at. There is not a single dichotomy between two types of pronoun use, but a cline, the crucial factor differentiating each position on the cline being the degree to which the pronoun's discourse referent or its intension is presupposed by the speaker. In section 2, I argue that the traditional notion 'antecedent', as espoused by TV, should be abandoned, and that it is in terms of the discourse model representation by means of which each discourse referent is encoded in the discourse model that anaphoric pronouns refer. Finally, in section 3, the role of the'agreement' of anaphoric pronouns in gender and number is examined, and the conclusion is drawn that this is not a necessary condition for pronominal anaphora. Referential-anaphoric pronouns are relatively independent indexical expressions, and their gender and number features may be manipulated by the speaker to achieve a variety of types of reference to a particular discourse referent. Suggestions as to fruitful areas for future research in the field of pronominal anaphora are derived from the foregoing discussion.
234
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
referential and non-referential (or purely syntactic) pronouns. All anaphoric third-person pronouns, whether they be reflexive, reciprocal, the equivalent of bound variables, or referential, are linguistically controlled by an antecedent head noun which either co-occurs with the pronoun in question or is inferred on the basis of the high saliency of some entity or object in the situational context of utterance at the point in the discourse when the pronoun occurs. All anaphorically-functioning third person pronouns (in French, German and other such languages) thus require for their interpretation the existence of a linguistic antecedent (a head noun); once this antecedent has been made available, its gender and number (if this is lexically specified) feature value is transferred via syntactic agreement to the pronoun, which can then provide a clue through its overt morphological signals to its antecedent, and hence (if there is one) to its referent. The relation of (syntactic) agreement in gender and, less crucially, number thus plays an important role in TV's account of non-deictic, pronominal anaphora in languages such as French, Dutch and German. B (1987), on the other hand (see also Bosch 1983, 1984), argues that within the category of anaphoric pronouns one should distinguish between referentially-functioning pronouns (RPs) and syntactically-functioning ones (SPs). Reinhart (1983) and I myself (Cornish 1986) draw a similar distinction, respectively, between "coreference" and "bound anaphora", and "discourse" and "strict" anaphora. In my case, however, I subsume a wider range of anaphoric relations than that fulfilled by SPs under the heading of "strict anaphora", and include deictic as well as referential-anaphoric pronouns in the category of "discourse anaphora". In Bosch (1983), B provides several diagnostic tests for determining whether a pronoun is functioning deictically, referential-anaphorically, or syntactic-anaphorically. The basic difference between RPs and SPs lies in the way in which each sub-type requires the understander to establish the anaphoric relation: in the case of RPs, it is established extensionally (i.e. potentially independently of any co-textual relationship with some antecedent expression), whereas one can argue that in the case of SPs, the relation is an intensional one, thus requiring the co-presence of a linguistic controller (i.e. notwithstanding B's description of such anaphoric relations as "syntactic"). Furthermore, according to B, referential anaphoric pronouns in languages with grammatical gender take their gender feature value in conformity with that of the head noun representing the basic category predicate used to refer to exemplars of the entity which that pronoun refers to, and which figures in the speaker's conceptual representation of this discourse referent. This is the case even when there is a textually co-occurring NP which could have acted as the pronoun's antecedent, where either the head noun of the conceptual representation of the discourse referent has a gender feature value distinct from that of the putative textual antecedent (in which case the pronoun's gender value will conform to (rather than "agree with", in the strict sense) the former rather than the latter), or the textual antecedent is identical with the
235
1. THE NATURE AND VALIDITY OF THE "RP/SP" DISTINCTION
TV in their (1985) paper make a number of criticisms of B's (1983) distinction between RPs and SPs within the category of anaphoric pronouns; many of these criticisms are pertinent, but a number of the examples they use in support of them are not compelling, and the conclusions they derive from them are not warranted. In particular, their own theory of anaphoric pronouns is over-simple, too narrow in scope, and cannot purport to claim psycholinguistic validity. /./. Contextual factors favouring an "SP" or an "RP" interpretation of pronouns TV's criticisms of the criteria proposed by B to distinguish between RPs and SPs, to the extent that they are valid, only show, I feel, that the tests in themselves do not yield clear-cut results; they do not show that there is no basic distinction in terms of the ways in which language processors actually compute anaphoric relations in the process of discourse understanding. (B himself recognises this point in his (1987:68). There can be, and are, instances where an anaphoric pronoun may be construed either in terms of syntacticagreement (or strict) anaphora or in terms of discourse-model anaphora (or "model-interpretive" anaphora, to use Sag & Hankamer's 1984 term). That is, the tests should not be viewed as yielding potentially disjoint classes of pronouns, but as symptoms of two potential types of strategy which understanders may make use of in processing anaphors (this is also conceded by B
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
basic category noun within the conceptual representation, in which case it will appear that the pronoun is agreeing syntactically with its antecedent, but in reality it is conforming pragmatically with the conceptual representation of its discourse referent. In B's account, then, there is a distinction between the relation of strict or syntactic agreement between the SP and its textual antecedent (or controller), on the one hand, and the relation of conformity in gender, person and (on occasion) number feature value between the RP and the basic category noun heading the NP representing the discourse referent in the speaker's discourse model. In TV's account, on the other hand, there is no such distinction: the relation of agreement involved is of exactly the same nature in each type of case and is conceived as involving the syntactic control by a textual or "absentee" (in TV's terminology) antecedent of the pronoun. It would seem that there are three general issues raised by this debate, namely, the nature and validity of the RP/SP distinction; the nature and status of the "antecedent" in anaphoric relations; and the nature and function of agreement or conformity in gender and (where appropriate) number between pronoun and antecedent or conceptual representation. I will deal with each of these three issues in turn in the remainder of this paper.
236 in his 1987 reply to TV's 1985 paper). In TV's examples (15a)-(15c), given below as (la)-(lc), (1)
a. b. c.
Julius's father hates him. Julius's father hates the poor chap. Nobody's father hates him.
(1)
b'. IJulius's father hates the senator.
In (lb) the epithet the poor chap is motivated pragmatically as a qualitative nonce expression indicating the speaker's sympathy for Julius's being the "victim" of his father's unnatural feelings towards him. The fact that the understander is at liberty, given the appropriate context, to adopt the referential or the logico-grammatical processing strategy for definite third-person pronouns is further demonstrated by the potential choice between "sloppy-identity" or "strict-identity" interpretations of pronouns affected by predicate anaphora of various kinds: (2)
Julius's father hates him, and Graham's does too.
Here the ellipsed predicate in the second conjunct can be interpreted either via the referential strategy (such that Graham's father hates Julius), or via the logico-grammatical strategy (such that a derived predicate "hating one's father" is created and applied to Graham, so that Graham is understood as
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
the referential NP the poor chap in (lb) can replace the pronoun him in (la) without destroying the anaphoric relation with Julius, thereby indicating that the understander's processing strategy for him may be in terms of the assumption of the prior existence of a suitable salient discourse referent in his discourse model at that point in the discourse (i.e. he adopts the referential strategy); and the fact that the non-referential NP Nobody can replace the referential antecedent Julius in (lc), still without destroying the anaphoric relation which him can contract with the determiner, shows that the understander may alternatively adopt a logico-grammatical strategy for interpreting him. But of course in such a case, given that the antecedent selected is a scope-bearing quantifier expression, the pronoun him is understood to have variable reference ranging over the set of human individuals quantified over by the operator corresponding to no. Note also, incidentally, that the lexical NP the poor chap chosen in (1 b) is in fact a pronominal epithet, a class of anaphoric expressions which can be shown to have equivalent anaphoric binding properties to pronominals (the null anaphor PRO and third-person pronouns) in the Government-Binding theory, and which clearly have a lower degree of intrinsic referentiality than definite descriptions of the type the senator. Compare in this regard (1 b) with the much less felicitous (lb'), under the anaphoric interpretation of the italicized expressions:
237
being hated by his own father). Note also that in the case of morphologically differentiated 'strict' anaphors such as reflexive pronouns, the "sloppy-identity" interpretation in such constructions is the only one possible, a fact consonant with the logico-grammatical function of such expressions (cf. Cornish 1986:38-45, 58-67; Bosch 1983:50-55): (3)
Julius hates himself, and Graham does too.
Interestingly too, reflexive pronouns can also be used referentially in contexts where they correspond to argument expressions used emphatically or contrastively, as in (4): (4)
Here of course, unlike the reflexive pronoun used in (3), the one in (4) would be distinguished by bearing a high degree of stress if spoken. Thus the possibility of interpreting him in (la) in terms of the referential strategy, as in (lb), or in terms of the logico-grammatical strategy, as in (lc), does not show that this distinction is non-existent; it simply shows that B's tests do not clearly discriminate between SP-functions and RP-functions in certain contexts. The two distinct modes of interpretation are more clearly apparent in examples of the type seen in (2). TV give further examples involving the putative anaphoric relations with the non-referential nobody in English orpersonne in French, in which, contra B's prediction, the anaphoric pronouns in question agree with (or conform to) a gender and number value not expressed by the putative antecedent expression. An example is their (17): (5)
(Husband has lost key and knocks at door of house, hoping wife is at home:) Nobody there! And {she/*he} promised to be back before midnight!
However, in (5) the pronouns cannot be said to be anaphoric to nobody (in any case, they occur outside the domain in which "syntactic agreement"-is said to operate; cf. B's (1983) example (129) Nobody was surprised. He had lost his key, in which he cannot be bound by nobody, and so can only be interpreted via the referential strategy; (129) contrasts with (128), in which he can have either variable orspecific,referentialreference: Nobody vvosswrpmec/ he had lost his key). In (5), a representation of the speaker's wife is already in his discourse model at the point at which the pronoun occurs; and indeed, this discourse referent is highly salient at this point in his discourse, his wife being the only solution to his present problem! It is evidently to this discourse referent that the pronoun refers, this clearly being a referential rather than a
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
" . . . In the brief moments when Ms Parkin was not clutching Quentin Crisp, I managed to talk to him about, well, himself." (The Observer, 24.6.84, p. 14)
238
syntactic occurrence. Hence the fact that the pronoun cannot be the unmarked masculine singular he (i.e. the generic pronoun) in putative syntactic agreement with nobody, is independently excluded by the fact that there cannot be a logico-syntactic relation between the two independent clauses in question. TV's examples involving the French personne, which they say is inherently specified as feminine in gender and singular in number (in fact, as a non-referential, indefinite grammaticalized marker of negation ranging over human beings, it is less than fully nominal in function and triggers neutral agreement with pronouns and adjectives), are not compelling either, since there is more to them than meets the eye. In their (19): (6)
they point out that if personne has singular number, it is not clear how the reciprocal interpretation of se can be arrived at, since such an interpretation obviously requires plurality. But surely this is to confuse form and meaning? First, the clitic reflexive pronoun se is invariant for number and gender; only its interpretation varies according to the reference of its antecedent. And second, (6) is surely an ellipsis of something like (6'): (6')
Personne parmi ces gens-la ne se connaissait. 'Nobody among those people knew each other.'
The same can be said of TV's other examples (20) and (23) (the latter from Dutch), reproduced below as (7) and (8), respectively. (7)
Je les ai tous interroges. Personne n'a reconnu qu'ils se connaissaient. 'I questioned them all. Nobody admitted that they knew each other.'
(8)
Wie vindt dat haar borsten te groot of te klein zijn, en daar echt problemen mee heeft, stapt beter dadelijk naar een goed plastisch chirurg. {Knack Weekend, 27:66, 3-7-85) 'Whoever finds that her breasts are too large or too small, and really feels this to be a problem, would (do) better (to) go to a good plastic surgeon immediately.'
In (8), as in (7), the context establishes a pragmatically restricted interpretation for wie, namely "Whoever amongst the subset of women in Flanders. . . " , and it is to this discourse referent (i.e. "the prototypical woman living in Flanders") that the feminine singular pronoun haar refers. Once again, it is with a referential rather than logico-semantic occurrence of the pronoun that we have to do. In all these putative counter-examples, then, it is apparent that TV have not fully taken into account the referential status of either the antecedent/
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Personne ne se connaissait. 'Nobody knew each other.'
239 controller expression or the pronoun. Nor have they taken proper account of the lexico-grammatical or discourse context in which the pronouns occur. In TV's examples with the non-referential antecedent rien, it would seem that the clause introduced by the subordinating element is not tightly integrated, grammatically, with the initial main clause (i.e. it is not part of its VP constituent), but modifies the initial clause as a whole. This is clear in the case of (9) (TV's (25)) (cf. Reinhart's 1983:60ff. discussion of sentential vs. verb-phrasal PPs): (9)
?* Rien n'a ete deplace pour qu'/Z soit davantage au soleil. 'Nothing has been moved in order for it to be more exposed to the sunshine.'
(10)
(Advertisement in favour of commercial advertising, relating a story about an imaginary shopkeeper who stopped advertising his goods:) " . . .Finally he had no customers! He had nothing to sell and no-one to sell it to!" (Adscene 17-7-80, p. 10)
In the case of TV's example (29), however (reproduced below as (11)), where the pronoun is in a ^ue-clause that is already part of the VP headed by the matrix verb, this does seem to me to be more acceptable (i.e. where // is understood as anaphoric to rien): (11)
?* Rien ici ne supporterait qu'/V soit deplace trop souvent (N.B. The status assignment here is TV's). 'Nothing here would stand for it to be moved too often.'
This would, in fact, bear out B's prediction regarding the possibility of SP-interpretation for the pronoun. The oddness of this sentence, attributed wrongly by TV to the anaphora between rien and //, is surely due to the fact that this more marked version of the sentence has been chosen over the more unmarked one in which the subordinate clause is realised as an infinitival phrase, with a 'zero' subject, as in (11)':
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
If this is so, then it is clear that the logico-semantic strategy for interpreting il here does not have a sound basis for applying: that is, as in the previous examples we have examined, the lexico-grammatical context of the pronoun indicates that it is functioning referentially rather than logico-semantically, whereas {unlike the previous examples) no potential discourse referent has been made available in the prior discourse context for it to refer to {rien here not having been contextually restricted in reference). Thus (9) is more incoherent as a potential discourse (-fragment) than ungrammatical as a sentence. The following attested English example is coherent precisely because the context allows a referent for // to be inferred (namely, a category of potentially saleable items) in this 'tongue-in-cheek' setting:
240
(11')
Rien ici ne supporterait d'etre deplace trop souvent. 'Nothing here would stand being moved too often.'
1.2. The "commutability" test and topics versus anti-topics
(12)
a. b.
La sentinelle, elle n'a rien entendu. 'The guard (fern.), he (fern.) hasn't heard anything.' Elle n'a rien entendu, la sentinelle. 'He (fern.) hasn't heard anything, the guard (fern.).' (TV's examples (30a,b))
But commutability, according to TV, is ruled out in such sentences: (13)
a. b.
* La sentinelle, l'andouille n'a rien entendu. 'The guard, the bastard hasn't heard anything.' * L'andouille n'a rien entendu, la sentinelle. 'The bastard, hasn't heard anything, the guard.' (TV's examples (31a,b))
However, it would seem that (13a) is just acceptable (though perhaps marked) as an utterance. It clearly cannot be assigned the status of ungrammatical, as TV would have it. And even (13b) can be rendered acceptable, with minimal alteration, motivating the "afterthoughtive" restatement of the anaphor's referent, as in (13b'): (13)
b'. L'andouille n'a rien entendu - la sentinelle, je veux dire. 'The bastard hasn't heard anything - the guard I mean.'
though admittedly this would entail, if spoken, a somewhat longer pause between the main predication and the afterthought topic than would be natural in the case of (13b)1. As things stand, however, (13b) is clearly much more severely deviant than (13a), and the difference is surely due to the difference in function between topicalization and anti-topicalization in discourse (see Lambrecht 1981:53-98, and below). To show that non-commutability does not necessarily mean the pronoun concerned is functioning as an SP, TV give examples using personne as the putative antecedent:
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
TV now turn to an examination of B's test of "non-commutability" of putative SPs: namely, the fact that genuine occurrences of pronouns bearing the SP function cannot be replaced with equivalent lexically-headed referring expressions which maintain the existing anaphoric relation (as well as the interpretation of the anaphor). They first look at "topic-shifted" pronouns in topicalization and anti-topicalization positions. Such pronouns are clearly referential in function, yet their reference (and the number and gender values they may bear) is restricted by the topic-shifted nominal whose "trace" they manifest:
241 (14)
a. b.
* Personne, il n'a rien entendu. 'Nobody, he hasn't heard anything.' * II n'a rien entendu, personne. 'He hasn't heard anything, nobody.' (TV's examples (32a,b)).
(15)
a. b.
?? La sentinelle, il dit qu'il n'a rien vu. 'The guard, he says he hasn't seen anyting.' * II pretend qu'il n'a rien vu, la sentinelle. 'He maintains he hasn't seen anything, the guard.'
But although TV say it is "nearly impossible" {ibid., p. 351), (15a) for me is perfectly acceptable; and (15b), though somewhat incoherent, is clearly not ungrammatical, as TV's asterisk indicates. The difference between (15a) and (15b) simply reflects the functional difference between topicalization and anti-topicalization which we have consistently seen in the earlier pairs of examples (viz. (13a,b) and (14a,b)). Perhaps we can account for these facts by distinguishing the functions of topics and anti-topics in discourse along the lines suggested for non-standard French by Lambrecht (1981: 53-98). Contra what TV (1985) imply, topic and anti-topic statuses are not simply mirror images of each other. Topics (as illustrated by the initial NPs in (12a), (13a), (14a) and (15a)) are discourse - rather than sentence - bound elements: they serve either to signal a topic shift or the speaker's establishing of a tacit agreement with his/her addressee as to what the local discourse topic is, and thus they bear secondary sentence stress. Their referents are presupposed rather than asserted and are
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Yet this does not work, since the topicalized (or anti-topicalized) constituent has to be a (potential) topic, and as such referential, something which the indefinite grammaticalized negator personne is not; it is not even a fully nominal NP. Moreover, the same type of difference in acceptability as in the pair of examples in (13) can be seen in (14) (i.e. the (b) example is much more severely deviant than the (a) one), even though the putative antecedent does not qualify as a potential topic expression. It is not, in fact, the case that, although "trace" pronouns of topicalized or antitopicalized constituents are RPs, they nevertheless exhibit the SP-type property of having to show gender agreement with their textual antecedent rather than with the head noun of the NP figuring in the conceptual representation of their discourse referent (cf. TV 1985:351). TV's example of this is their (35a) and (35b):
242
referentially definite. Their exponents are not marked for case, and this characteristic reflects their relative syntactic-semantic independence from the predication which follows. Anti-topics (as illustrated in (12b), (13b), (14b) and (15b)), on the other hand, are sentence - rather than discourse - bound: they can never perform the function of selecting one from a set of potential (anti-)topics and establishing this one as the current local discourse topic, as topics are able to do. One of Lambrecht's most telling minimal pairs in this respect is his (80) and (125), representing the topic and antitopic functions, respectively: (16)
a.
(16b) can be contrasted with the unproblematic (16c) (Lambrecht's (126)), where the anti-topic simply reinstates the pre-existing local topic established by the subject of the initial sentence, the subject's referent being the one which is generally the most highly presupposed: (16)
c.
(Anti-topic function) Le bout de papier provient de l'etiquette d'une boite a conserve. En fait, j-1-ai-eu en main un peu avant de vous-rencontrer, ce bout de papier. 'The piece of paper comes from the label of a tin can. In fact, I held it in my hand just before I met you, that piece of paper.'
Thus in Lambrecht's (1981:94) words, the referents of anti-topics, unlike those of topics, must "always be "taken for granted" ".They represent the most highly presupposed discourse entities of all those established in their discourse domain, and thus receive a low or zero degree of stress as well as low pitch. In addition, they are never (unlike "afterthought" topics - see (13b') and note 1) separated by a pause from the predication which precedes, and they are marked for case. Thus they are relatively well integrated into that predication, unlike topics. Given these essential differences, we would expect to see the sort of systematic contrasts in acceptability in examples such as the pairs which TV present in (12)-(15). First, it is clear from the previous discussion that the pronouns in these examples must be RP rather than SP occurrences, as TV in
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(Topic function) Le bout de papier provient de l'etiquette d'une boite a conserve, et la boite dont il-a-ete arrache, j-1-ai-eue en main un peu avant de vous-rencontrer (Herge). 'The piece of paper comes from the label of a tin can, and the tin can it had been torn off I held in my hand just before I met you.' b. (Anti-topic function) #Le bout de papier provient de l'etiquette d'une boite a conserve, et j-1-ai-eue en main un peu avant de vous-rencontrer, la boite dont il-a-ete arrache. 'The piece of paper comes from the label of a tin can, and I held it • in my hand just before I met you, the tin can it had been torn off.'
243
1.3. A reassessment of the "SP"/"RP"
distinction
There are thus quite different forces at work in these pairs of examples than the ones TV (and indeed, even B) were assuming. Yet we cannot conclude from all this, I think, simply that TV are wrong in their claim that there is no principled distinction to be drawn between SP and RP uses of third person pronouns, and that B is right to say that such a distinction is valid. The data and discussion presented so far strongly suggest that some such distinction does exist, but at a more general level than is indicated by B's two types of pronoun use. The distinction is to a large extent under the speaker's control, and involves the degree of anaphoricity of the (pronominal) anaphor in context: where that context requires that the anaphor's referent is highly presupposed, then the category in terms of which that referent has been entered into the discourse model is inevitably part of that presupposition: in such cases, there will tend to be syntactic agreement (or 'conformity') between the pronominal anaphor chosen and the head noun of its textual antecedent. This situation would subsume both SP uses and other instances
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
fact agree they are. Second, given the greater degree of independence of topics in relation to their following predications, it is clear that we can expect syntactic agreement with the textual 'antecedent' to occur more readily in the case of antitopics than in that of topics. This no doubt explains the difference in acceptability between (15a) and (15b). Third, given the replacement of the pronoun in such constructions by a pronominal epithet (i.e. a lexically-headed NP), it is clear that the result of this will be functionally less incongruous in the case of topic 'antecedents' than in that of anti-topic ones, due to the greater functional independence of the topic from its predication and to the fact that the subject expression (I'andouille in (13b)) still bears a relatively high degree of stress if spoken. In the case of the anti-topic construction (cf. (13b)), however, the degree of referentiality of the putative anti-topic (la sentinelle) is much higher than that of its anaphor (I' andouille); hence, it would need to bear a relatively higher degree of stress than the other NP, a requirement which conflicts with its putative status as anti-topic (compare this example with L'andouille n'a rien entendu, I'idiot). More natural, of course, would be the utterance in which the functions of these two NPs are reversed, la sentinelle acting as subject, and I'andouille as anti-topic - signalling the fact that its referent is more highly presupposed. The actual ordering of the two as used by TV in (13b) can therefore be seen to result in a relatively incoherent discourse. This kind of explanation no doubt carries over to the deviant (15b) since la sentinelle, again in anti-topic position, is at once less highly presupposed than //, due to its lexical property, and more highly presupposed due to its fulfilling the anti-topic function. The requirement of identity of gender and number feature values between pronoun and 'antecedent' here is thus all the greater than in (15a). The contrast between (14a) and (14b) can be explained along similar lines.
244
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
of'strict' anaphora (see Cornish 1986:Ch. 3) and AP occurrences of the kind seen in (12). In instances where the pronoun's referent is less highly presupposed (or where the speaker chooses to treat it as less highly presupposed), a referential-anaphoric pronoun will be used. In such cases, the pronoun takes its reference via the conceptual representation of its discourse referent which is already located in the relevant discourse model. The higher degree of independent reference potential borne by such anaphors means that syntactic agreement with a co-occurring textual antecedent (or "antecedent-trigger", as I prefer to call such expressions) is not required. Deictic pronouns are used in instances which involve the least highest degree of presupposition of the referent, since they may be used to introduce a new discourse referent, or to shift the focus level already assigned to a hitherto highly presupposed discourse referent. Thus it is both true to say, as do TV, that there is no difference, in one sense, between SPs and APs (or at least, one type of APs), since both involve syntactic (or textual) agreement, and, as does B, that there is one type of pronominal anaphora which involves an essentially textual relation (mediated by syntactic agreement), and another which involves direct reference within a discourse model; however, the line should be drawn in the latter case, not between SPs on the one hand, and APs on the other, but between SPs and other 'strict' anaphors together with highly presupposed APs, on the one hand, and less highly presupposed APs (i.e. referential pronouns), on the other. One important point made by TV in connection with their (valid) argument that the configurational domain defined by c-command relationships (cf. Reinhart 1983) is not criterial forSP-interpretations of pronouns is worth noting. It is that various semantic-pragmatic features of the utterance context, including most crucially the semantics of the matrix verb, may override the predictions of the c-command constraint in strongly favouring an anaphoric interpretation of the matrix subject NP and the subject of a clause subordinate to it, in spite of the fact that the latter subject is a lexical NP rather than a pronoun. They compare in this respect the verbs dire and regretter, on the one hand, with s'imaginer and decrocher, on the other. Both dire and regretter art, speech-reporting verbs in which the one saying and the one regretting are at least vouching for the source of the content of what is being said or regretted; whereas in the case of s'imaginer, the speaker is specifically indicating that the referent of the subject of its subordinate clause is misguided in his or her belief. Likewise in the case of decrocher, in the colloquial sense of "obtain", there is a distancing effect between the referent of the matrix subject and that of the embedded clause subject, the choice by the speaker of the colloquial verb decrocher indicating his/her sarcasm about what has been obtained by the referent in question. (17a) and (17b) (TV's (49) and (50), respectively) are thus incoherent as utterances, while (18a) and (18b) (TV's (51) and (52)) are coherent:
245
(17)
a.
b.
(18)
a.
Le comite s'imagine que ce ramassis de vieux crabes restera au pouvoir. 'The committee imagines that this bunch of old crabs will stay in power.' Le comite a decroche que ce ramassis de vieux crabes reste au pouvoir. 'The committee managed to obtain that this bunch of old crabs will stay in power.'
The use of the pejorative expression ce ramassis de vieux crabes is coherent as an alternative identification of the committee in (18a) and (18b), since the distancing effect of the verbs s'imaginer and decrocher signals the speaker's intervention in the reporting of the two situations; in other words, the choice of subject NP in the subordinate clauses can be understood as corresponding to the speaker's own subjective appreciation. The same NP in (17a) and (17b) results in incoherence when a 'coreferential' interpretation is attempted with the matrix subject, since the choice of the matrix verbs dire and regretter, respectively, indicates that the content of the subordinate clauses is being objectively reported in each case, with no subjective intervention on the part of the speaker. Hence, the use of a pejorative expression, signalling the speaker's negative appreciation of the committee, results in incoherence, it being otherwise unlikely that the latter would refer to itself so disparagingly. The reason for the acceptability of the lexical NP in putative SP-position in (18a,b) is thus identical to that for which the poor chap (also a pronominal epithet) is acceptable as an anaphor for Julius in (lb) (see § 1.1 above). The contrast between (17) and (18) corresponds to the well-known de dicto/de re distinction, respectively. Kempson (1986) goes further, and shows that for every type of pragmatic (i.e. referential) use of a lexically-headed nominal anaphor, there is a corresponding type of 'bound anaphoric' use of the same expression. If this is so, then substitution of a lexical NP for a pronoun cannot be diagnostic of SP versus RP uses. In Cornish (1986:Ch. 3) too, I lay stress on the fact that all the 'strict' anaphors in English and French which I discuss appear to have a parallel use as discourse-referential anaphors, as well as on the fact that in many cases, specific 'strict anaphoric' interpretations of these anaphors are determined by discourse-pragmatic factors. Thus it is not the case, as B implies with his categorical distinction between SP and RP uses of pronouns,
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
b.
#Le comite adit que ceramassisde vieux crabes restera au pouvoir. 'The committee said that this bunch of old crabs will stay in power.' #Le comite a regrette que ce ramassis de vieux crabes reste au pouvoir. 'The committee regretted that this bunch of old crabs stays in power.'
246
(19)
a. b.
Look, fathead. If everyone loves Oscar's mother, then certainly Oscar must love Oscar's mother. Look fathead. If everyone loves Oscar's mother, then certainly Oscar must love his mother.
In (19a), as in (18a,b), the second occurrence of Oscar c-commands the third, but a coreferential interpretation of the two expressions in nonetheless possible: but it is an 'external' coreference, since the third occurrence of Oscar does not "pick up its reference", in Evans's (1980) terms, from the second, its reference being accounted for by prior discourse. In (19b) (analogous to
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
or Reinhart with her equally categorical distinction between bound and pragmatic anaphora, that there is any sharp distinction between syntax-semantics, on the one hand, and pragmatics, on the other. As I suggested above (see also Cornish 1986:115, 124-5), the true relationship is in the nature of a cline, these two aspects of meaning being mutually reinforcing and interdependent rather than polar. In one sense, nevertheless, TV's contrast illustrated in (17) and (18), though it clearly establishes the point that c-commanded positions do not obligatorily require SPs to occur in them, in fact proves B's essential point at a more general level. That is, just as the 'bound' anaphor is within the scope of its textual controller and has its interpretation wholly determined by it, so speech-reporting verbs, when they are used to report a statement by a speaker about him/herself, impose a relation of 'internal' coreference between the referent of the matrix subject and that of the subordinate clause representing the reported speech. This explains why in (17a) and (17b) there is incoherence when a lexical NP whose N is a predicate which cannot have been used by the speech reporter in reference to itself (the committee) is used in a context where the coreference must be 'internal'. Other verbs signalling the existence of the speaker's point of view about the belief of some entity with respect to some state of affairs in which that entity is involved (the case of verbs like s'imaginer), or about the actual state of affairs itself (the case of verbs like decrocher) naturally impose a relation of'external' coreference between the matrix subject and the subordinate clause subject, where both expressions are capable of referring to the same entity. Note that if the subordinate clause subject is manifested by a pronoun, this type of interpretive contrast is not available. The contrast which TV are establishing, then, is symptomatic of the more general distinction which I claimed above exists between the category represented by 'strict' anaphors and highly presupposed AP occurrences of anaphors, on the one hand, and referential anaphors which refer via their referent's discourse model representation, on the other. The contrast in question is further analogous to the well-known exception to the c-command constraint on coreference, noted by Evans (1980), in contrast to the more usual case where the c-command constraint is respected:
247
2. THE "ANTECEDENT" IN ANAPHORIC RELATIONS
TV place considerable emphasis on the role of the antecedent in anaphoric relations. The paradigm case for them is that of the textually co-occurring lexically-specified definite or indefinite NP which represents the first mention of the sense or referent which the anaphor then takes up. This is, indeed, the traditional conception of the notion 'antecedent'. Instances where the apparent antecedent is not the actual one, or where there is no textually-co-occurring candidate antecedent, are assumed to be 'marked' cases and are explained in terms of the more basic case: that is, in both types of instance, a missing or "absentee" antecedent (as they in fact call it) has to be recovered or reconstructed from context in order for the anaphor to receive its full interpretation. The antecedent, thus conceived, becomes particularly important as the source of the agreement manifested by all pronominal anaphors in their non-deictic use, in TV's scheme (I shall discuss this aspect of the relation in section 3 below). The conception of anaphora which underlies this approach is thus that it is an essentially textual relation between two expressions, in which context also plays a contributory part. The notion of a "discourse model representation" which is under construction by speaker and addressee alike as the discourse develops, is given only scant recognition by the authors. This conception of anaphora has much in common with the view of textual cohesion expressed in Halliday & Hasan (1976), in terms of which "cohesive ties" are established within a text between "presupposing" (i.e. anaphors of various kinds, as well as conjunctive elements) and "presupposed" items. For B (as well as myself), however, text is merely one of the inputs to the participants' discourse model representation, a representation whose existence is essential to any adequate explanation of anaphora. Thus, for B, all AP pronouns refer directly via a conceptual representation of their referent-
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(17a,b) with a pronoun replacing the lexical anaphor), on the other hand, the coreference is 'internal', the pronoun "picking up its reference" entirely from its c-commanding antecedent, the second occurrence of Oscar. As Reinhart (1983:168) implies, the relation between the second occurrence of Oscar and the pronoun in (19b) is actually one of bound anaphora, whereas in (19a), the bound-anaphora interpretation of the two equivalent expressions cannot have been intended. This whole discussion brings into sharp relief the crucial role of the governing predicate (usually the verb) in the creation of anaphoric relations, something which neither B nor TV appear to focus upon; both accounts, indeed, continue to maintain the traditional assumption that anaphora merely involves two expressions, the antecedent and the anaphor, in detachment, as it were, from their textual context. This assumption will be the focus of the next section.
248
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
even those for which there is a possible candidate antecedent which is textually co-present. TV (1985:section 2) criticize B for claiming that in cases of "inferred antecedents" and antecedentless AP pronouns, the pronoun is referring directly to a conceptual representation and not via a linguistic antecedent head noun. TV's claim is that some such antecedent noun is always present - whether textually or latently, as the 'default' name of an object, in the case of pronouns referring to objects, or as the nouns homme for a pronoun referring to a male human being, and femme for a pronoun referring to a female one. TV's point is that gender-marked AP pronouns could only be explained in terms of some antecedent noun, gender agreement being a linguistic not a conceptual property. However, in the quotation which they give (p. 359) from B's (1984:7), it is clear that B is referring to a linguistically-encoded conceptual representation of discourse referents: " . . .in gender languages, one of the factors that influence the conceptual gender of a referent in an unmarked context is the grammatical gender of the common noun denoting the basic category of the referent" (my italics -FC). Perhaps one feature of this quotation which may have misled TV into thinking that for B linguistic categories do not intervene in such conceptual representations is the 'shorthand' expression "conceptual gender", for the "gender of the noun in terms of which the referent has been conceptualized". TV then point out in objecting to this view (same page) that "the conceptual representation of the object TABLE will not be the same when the associated noun (-phrase) is la table in one context, le meuble in another context". Yet there is no possible confusion here, since the noun meuble, unlike table, is not a basic-level but a superordinate-level category noun - that is, it does not denote "the basic category of its referent" (cf. Rosch 1978). But since TV also invoke the notion of a default noun denoting the basic entities of a particular category, and since there seems little doubt that this should be given the status of a mental or conceptual item of lexical/encyclopedic knowledge possessed by speakers and addressees, there would seem to be little real difference between the two positions. What difference there is, it seems to me, has to do with the role and function of this linguistically-encoded conceptual representation with respect to the functioning of anaphora. For TV, it acts as a surrogate textual antecedent, whereas for B the notion antecedent (as traditionally conceived, and as conceived by TV) is of minor importance: for him, anaphora proper "presupposes that the referent should already have its place in the universe-of-discourse", in Lyons's (1977:673) terms (cf. also B's 1983:202). Hence, anaphoric pronouns refer to discoursemodel representations of their referents, representations which are linguistically encoded partially (but not wholly) in terms of the textual environment of the pronouns concerned (an environment which may or may not also include what is traditionally referred to as their antecedents). For B, then, it is within this discourse-model representation that what TV refer to as a linguistic or "absentee" antecedent occurs. Clearly, a conceptually or mentally located basic category noun is needed to account at least for antecedentless
249
3. THE ROLE OF AGREEMENT IN PRONOMINAL ANAPHORA
In section 2, we rejected the view, argued for by TV, that it is the antecedent in anaphoric relations which controls the interpretation of the anaphor, this control relation being manifested in the antecedent's agreement feature values which are re-expressed in its pronominal anaphor. B (1987:69) is correct, I think, to align this approach to pronominal anaphora with the accounts of Bloomfield and Hockett in terms of substitution, and with the transformationalist account within TG which formalized this in terms of a pronominalization transformation: all of the well-known theoretical problems for such a substitutional account, of which the famous "Bach-Peters" paradox mentioned by B is one, would clearly apply equally as well to TV's account in terms of antecedent control. If, however, we abandon the theoretical role of the antecedent, as traditionally conceived, and concomitantly view pronouns and other anaphors as indexical expressions having intrinsic lexical and referential properties, then we are free to take a different view of the agreement which pronouns
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
anaphors (a need on which TV and B agree); and since in any case, a discourse-model representation is required not only foran account of anaphor resolution but of discourse understanding as a whole, of which anaphor resolution is a (crucial) part (cf. Webber 1979 for substantial evidence and arguments to this effect), then generality dictates that it is at this level of analysis that 'antecedents' should be invoked. Webber (1979:22, Ch.l), indeed, actually uses the term 'antecedent' for the logico-semantic construct which defines the 'address' in her discourse model representations for discourse referents. I personally think this is the most satisfactory way in which the notion 'antecedent' should be construed, and prefer the term 'antecedenttrigger' for what are traditionally known as 'antecedents' (i.e. textual antecedents, as in TV's conception) (cf. Cornish, 1986:142-9, passim). In the case both of 'strict' anaphora (i.e. including SP-functioning pronouns) and of discourse anaphora, it is the form of the pronoun, its immediate lexico-grammatical environment, and the type of relation contracted between the anaphoric clause and its discourse context (a relation determined by the interpretative principle of discourse coherence), which provide an interpretation for the anaphor. This is the case irrespective of whether there is a candidate textual 'antecedent' in the co-text (see Cornish 1986: Chs 2-4, and Wiese 1983 for evidence and arguments to this effect). In neither type of case is it revealing to talk of the 'antecedent' controlling the anaphor: indeed, in a great many cases, it is by providing a contextual interpretation for the anaphor that the textual antecedent, where it exists, is reinterpreted. Such a view of anaphora in discourse sees it as a dynamic, hierarchically-sensitive process rather than as a static, linearly-defined relationship. I shall develop this approach further in the next section.
250
(20)
a. b.
(John wants his pants that are on a chair and he says to Mary:) Could you hand {them/ *it} to me, please? (Same situation, but with a shirt) Could you hand {it/*them) to me, please?
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(in languages with grammatical gender) manifest. In Wiese's (1983:392) view, the agreement feature values of number and gender borne by a third person pronoun constitute that part of its lexical meaning which serves to delimit its extension. He calls this its "associative potential", using the following definition: "We may say that a pronoun CONFORMS to nouns of the same gender or, more generally, that a pronoun has a certain ASSOCIATIVE POTENTIAL due to formal lexical associations." (ibid., p. 392). Wiese treats the gender and number feature values which are encoded in third person pronouns, where they form a syncretism rather than being realised as inflections, as lexical rather than strictly grammatical. This is the view of pronominal 'agreement' in number and gender I shall be adopting in the remainder of this article. Let us first differentiate between 'agreement' in gender and 'agreement' in number, in languages like French and German which possess both grammatical and referential gender and number categories. In Cornish (1986:5.4,6.3) I laid emphasis on the fact that a French NP's gender feature value tends to derive from that of its head noun - i.e. grammatical gender is a lexical category in that language; a French NP's number feature value, on the other hand, is most commonly a phrasal rather than lexical category: that is, its number feature value will most frequently be determined by that NP's being used by a speaker in referring to a single referent or to multiple referents. However, though gender is usually a lexical property of French nouns (i.e. dictionary items), it may be determined referentially in terms of the assignment by the speaker of his/her referent to one or the other socio-culturally defined sex categories. This is the case, for example, with person-denoting nouns without any inherent gender feature value, such as concierge. It is only when such nouns are formed into an NP (i.e. a potentially referring expression) and are actually used in context to refer to some individual or individuals that the nouns in question receive a particular gender feature value. Conversely, in the case of number, there are a small number of French nouns which are inherently (i.e. lexically) specified for number (e.g. funerailles, plur., lenebres, plur.,), even though such nouns may be used to head NPs which refer to single entities. It is interesting to note that all of TV's now classic examples purporting to show that pronominal anaphora always involves the control of the pronoun by an antecedent head noun make use of lexically rather than referentially derived number and gender. Thus the "absentee antecedent" pants in (20a) (TV's (1)) is lexically specified as plural in number, and likewise table and bureau in (21a,b) (TV's (3) and (4)) are lexically specified as, respectively, feminine and masculine in gender.
251 (21)
a.
b.
(John is trying to stuff a large table {la table, feminine) in the trunk of his car; Mary says:) Tu n'arriveras jamais a {la/*le} faire entrer dans la voiture. 'You will never manage to stuff {it (fern.)/ it (masc.)} into the car.' (Same situation, but with a desk (le bureau, masculine):) Tu n'arriveras jamais a {le/*la} faire entrer dans la voiture. 'You will never manage to stuff {it (masc.)/ it (fern.)} into the car.'
(20)
b'. (Mary hands John a shirt with a detachable collar, which he is about to put on:) John: I've never really liked them, you know.
Here the reference would of course be to the type of shirt of which the particular shirt in question is a token). The situation in French, as in (21a) and (21b), however, is more clear-cut. But this brief discussion already demonstrates that agreement between antecedent noun and anaphoric pronoun is not a necessary condition for (pronominal) anaphora. (20b') shows that a more crucial factor is the nature of the reference effected by the anaphor and by the clause in which it occurs as a whole. TV's choice of an 'antecedent' whose number is lexically derived, as in (20a), and of ones whose gender is likewise lexically derived, as in (21a,b), leads to the implication that there is no essential difference between agreement in number and agreement in gender, here due to the fact that an English 'antecedent' bearing lexically-derived number has been chosen. In more usual cases, however, it appears that third-person non-reflexive, non-reciprocal pronouns in both English and French are much freer to assume a number feature value which is different from that of their 'antecedent', than a gender feature value. However, where the gender feature value is referentially rather than lexically derived, there may of course be a discrepancy in this respect. The point I want to make here is that this difference concerning the source of a pronoun's gender as well as number feature value - lexical versus referential - provides the speaker with a subtle means of imposing, a posteriori, a particular referential perspective upon a referent which has already been entered into the discourse model. In Cornish (1986:5.4 and 6.3), I argued that this discourse function was one of the characteristic features of discourse pronouns, as well as of NP-external agreement targets (to use Corbett's 1983 terminology) more generally. Let us examine some attested examples which illustrate this possibility.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
However, the (a) and (b) variants within each of these examples are not quite as parallel as TV are implying, since in the English example (20a), at least, the unmarked pronoun for reference to inanimate objects, it, could in fact be used coherently instead of them. On the other hand, them could not be used in the situation indicated in (20b) (though them could in fact be used in a generalising context, even where one single shirt is the current focus of attention, as in (20b'):
252
(22)
" . . .le premier ministre (masc, sing.) [of Britain - at the time, Mrs Thatcher], il est vrai, n'avait pas cache, en s'installantau 10 Downing Street, que la periode qui s'ouvrait serait plus marquee par le sang, la sueur et les larmes que par la facilite. //(masc, sing.) peut, en outre, faire valoir que nombre de ces difficultes ont ete heritees des travaillistes..." (Le Monde, leader column, p. 1, 21-5-81) 'The Prime Minister, it is true, did not conceal, when she moved into 10 Downing Street, that the period then to begin would be marked more by blood, sweat, and tears than by facility. He could, moreover, rightly maintain that some of these problems belonged to the Labour legacy.'
(23)
Le ministre des Affaires Sociales a confirme, dans une longue interview accordee au journal 'Le Monde' et publiee dans l'edition du 27 mars de ce quotidien, qu'{elle/?il} prendra les mesures necessaires. (TV's (80)) 'The minister for Social Affairs confirmed, in a long interview to the newspaper 'Le Monde' and published in the 27 March edition of this newspaper, that {she/he} will take the necessary measures.'
The distance (whether linear or syntactic) between the textual antecedent and the pronoun is even greater in (22) (where the pronoun does not even occur within the same sentence as its 'antecedent') than in (23), and yet the grammatically agreeing pronoun in the latter is marked as being of dubious grammaticality. In fact, it is perfectly possible even here, though the referential perspective it would serve to superimpose upon its discourse referent is significantly different than is the case where elle is used. The meaning distinction here, I suggest, is analogous to Donnellan's (1966) distinction between the "attributive" and "referential" meaning values of definite NPs in context. While the "attributive" status of a definite NP involves the application of the description contained within it as a criterion determining the potential membership of a particular class of entities, the "referential" use involves the identification of one particular entity from amongst a set of entities. In French and other languages with a distinction between lexical (i.e. grammatically specified) gender and number, and referential gender and number, it seems that in those cases where the gender or number value of a pronoun is the same as that of the head noun of its antecedent-trigger, the
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(22) is a direct counterexample to TV's (1985:368-9) claim that "the search for an antecedent-with-gender which is present in discourse does not go beyond a certain distance...", even though they do not specify exactly what that distance is. Their example (80) would indicate that such a usage as is illustrated in (22) would be impossible; but they clearly have not taken due account of the systematic variation in gender and number feature values which is possible in certain circumstances:
253
(24)
" . . . L'independance universitaire est, elle aussi, diminuee. Le ministre (masc, sing.) [at the time, Mme Alice Saunier-Seite]s'octroieledroit de nommer le tiers des membres du conseil superieur. . . . Sauf si le ministre est infiniment sage,... Pourqueleverrouillagesoitparfait, le ministre des universites s'octroie egalement le pouvoir de recruter lui-meme (masc, sing.) qui bon lui semble sur les postes de professeurs nouvellement crees... l'intervention directe du ministre,... Le ministre des universites avait annonce une nuit du 4 aout pour les universitaires. Elle (fern., sing.) connait decidement fort mal son histoire, car elle apporte tout le contraire: le renforcement des privileges des notables..." (J. Gattegno, Le Monde, 22-8-79). 'The universities' independence is also diminished. The minister gives himself the right to appoint one third of the members of the highest university council... Except if the minister is infinitely wise,... In order to ensure that his control is perfect, the minister in charge of the universities also gives himself the power to appoint to newly created teaching positions anyone he sees fit... the minister's direct intervention. .. The minister in charge of the universities had announced a 'night of
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
reference is not unequivocally to a specific individual qua individual, but to that individual in his/her capacity as possessor of the attribute defined by the descriptive component (i.e. the head noun and any dependent adjectives or restrictive relative clauses) of the NP as a whole; and that, in those cases where the gender or number value of the pronoun corresponds to the sex or actual number of its referent, in instances where this value is distinct from the lexical gender or number value of the head noun of its antecedent-trigger, the reference is to a specific individual or individuals in principle independently of his/her/their possessing the particular property defined by the antecedenttrigger's descriptive component. Though this difference is not as radical as that expressed by the 'referential' vs. 'attributive' distinction in Donnellan's sense (in that the reference is still to a particular individual in each case), it is nonetheless a difference of the same general kind. My position is that this is a difference in 'referential perspective', rather than a difference in reference per se, which is what Donnellan's distinction serves to mark. I believe that it is the third person pronouns, as well as the articles and determiners at the level of the NP itself, rather than fully specified NPs, which in their role as 'discourse operators' signal such differences in referential perspective. Example (24) clearly shows this dynamic, discourse role which third person pronouns can perform, and further indicates that the speaker's referential perspective upon a discourse entity may shift as the discourse develops. Under TV's system, the pronouns involved here would need to be controlled by different 'antecedents' - a wholly counterintuitive move. The example demonstrates, on the contrary, the relative autonomy and intrinsic contribution of the anaphors concerned.
254
4 August' for the universities. Her historical knowledge is decidedly bad, for she has brought about exactly the opposite: the reinforcement of the mandarins' privileges...'
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
In this extract from a letter to Le Monde, it appears that the gender of the pronouns has been determined as a function of the particular mode of reference signalled by the discourse segment in which they occur. In the first paragraph of the extract, the writer lays emphasis upon the new status and powers devolving upon the minister as a result of the then recent law regarding the recruitment of University teachers. Gattegno is focusing here upon the role of the minister for the Universities as such, as can be seen from the rhetorical function of the repetition of the full NP le ministre instead of the use of the appropriate pronouns, and from the fact that the sentences in this paragraph have the force of general statements, their tense/ aspect being the simple present. The rhetorical function of the final paragraph, however, is quite different. Here, the emphasis is upon the particular individual fulfilling the role of minister for the Universities at the time of writing. Given such an immediate discourse context, it would have been extremely odd if the author had chosen a pronoun agreeing in gender with the head noun of the antecedent-trigger (which is repeated in the initial sentence of the paragraph in question), instead of a pronoun whose gender corresponds to the sex of the actual individual referred to in the paragraph. In other words, we may say that there is a kind of 'agreement', or congruence, between the gender-marking of the pronouns and the rhetorical or discourse function of the discourse unit in which they occur. This is exactly what we have noticed throughout this section, as well as throughout section 1, where we observed a variety of contextual features which motivated the SP- or RP-interpretations of pronouns. Exactly the same kind of explanation can be given for the choice of the masculine singular pronoun // in (22). The sentence of which this pronoun is the subject functions, discoursally, as an."Elaboration", in Hobb's( 1979) terms,of the initial statement of this discourse fragment. Thejournalist's concern in this sentence is to say something about Mrs Thatcher in her capacity as prime minister of Britain, rather than about her as an individual in her own right; indeed, Mrs Thatcher's special responsibilities as prime minister are stressed in the predications which constitute the discourse fragment as a whole. A further motivation for the use of the masculine (i.e. lexically derived) rather than feminine (i.e. referentially derived) gender here is that the two sentences which make up the extract amount to a kind of disguised reported speech: these are M rs Thatcher's actual statements, reported from her own point of view rather thanfromthatofthejournalist.Thus,asinthecaseof(17a,b)and(19b)(seethe discussion in section 1.3, above), we have to do with an instance of 'internal', rather than 'external' coreference, and so the pronoun whose gender triggers the restoration to salience of the lexical content of its own antecedenttrigger is chosen.
255
(25)
" . . . Le juge d'instruction (masc, sing.) [here Mme. Francoise Llaurens-Guerin] est, lui (masc, sing.), investi de cette fonction d'equilibre..." (Le Monde, 15-8-81, p. 1) 'The examining magistrate himself is invested with that office of balance...'
It is abundantly clear by now that it is factors connected with discourse reference and predication which are motivating all such choices. The principles which TV are claiming are in fact nothing more than tendencies, which are themselves motivated by referential considerations, considerations which TV are much too discreet about in their account of pronominal anaphora. One rather extreme example of the discourse function of gender- and number-marking in anaphors, where these features actually determine a wholly new (though related) discourse referent in terms of their anaphor's antecedent-trigger, is given below. • (26)
"Dans leseauxsitueesentreOet 12 millesautourdesIlesBritanniques (fern., plur.), ce dernier (masc, sing.) proposait de "geler" les quotas de capture des pecheurs continentaux au niveau de 1977..." (Le Monde, 26,27-11-78) 'In the waters between 0 and 12 miles around the British Isles, the latter proposed to "freeze" the contingents offish to be alloted to fishermen from the Continent at the level of 1977...'
Here, the gender and number feature values of the anaphor are opposite to those of its antecedent-trigger, and it is the three factors of the lexical content of that antecedent-trigger, the nature of the predication in the anaphoric clause, and the clash of gender and number features in the anaphor itself
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
This kind of explanation of the variation between lexically-assigned and referentially-assigned gender and number feature values in pronouns would also explain TV's (1982) claim that it is clitic pronouns whose gender is 'controlled' by an antecedent noun, whereas independent or disjunctive pronouns, since they correspond to arguments, are directly 'controlled' by the relevant extra-linguistic features of their actual referent. This is surely a reflection of the status of clitic pronouns as less than independent referring expressions, their dependency in their capacity as 'antecedentless' pronouns being signalled by their quasi-obligatory conformity with the gender value of the basic-level noun predicate within the description encoding their discourse referent's entry within the relevant discourse model. However, such a conformity is not always obligatory, as can be seen from the feminine singular subject clitic pronouns used in the second paragraph of example (24). Conversely, disjunctive pronouns may in fact conform with the gender value of their antecedent-trigger's head noun, as can be seen from the use of the masculine singular emphatic reflexive pronoun lui-meme in (24), or lui in (25):
256 which together permit the inference of a new discourse referent whose discourse model representation would be "le gouvernement du pays nomine Ma Grande Bretagne'". Having drawn a distinction between pronouns referring to humans, and pronouns referring to objects, TV (1985:369) then claim that '"the notions of distance and acquaintance with the referent play no role whatsoever if the antecedent is an object rather than a human. As there is no default proper name for objects, only the specific proper name of the object considered can determine gender for any agreement items, regardless of distance, and regardless of whether the noun which serves as the name for the object is present in discourse or not". However, two attested examples presented in Rosenberg (1970: note 20, p. 58) would seem to be counterexamples: "Tu as vu ma derniere acquisition (fem., sing.)?... (Le visiteur va vers le tableau, le prend, fait mine de I'examiner.) - Dis done! - Oui? //(masc, sing.)est j o l i . . . //esttresjoli... C'estpeut-etreunCorot". (extract from the script of Les amoureux sont seuls au monde by H. Jeanson, in Paris-Theatre 18, p. 58) 'You have seen my latest acquisition?... I say! - Yes? - It is nice... it is very nice... - It's possibly a Corot.'
(28)
"[Prison guard arrives with meal.] First prisoner - Qu'est-ce que e'est? Guard - Le potage (masc, sing.) du chef au vermicelle... [The men have begun to eat.] Second prisoner - Elle (fem., sing.) n'est pas mangeable." (extract from the script of Le trou, by J. Becker and J. Giovanni, in L' A\ ant-scene du cinema 13, 1962, p. 10) 'What is it? - The chefs vermicelli s o u p . . . - It is not fit to eat.'
Rosenberg himself points out (ibid., p. 59) that the contingent designation acquisition (fem.) in (27) for the referent in question is rejected in favour of the more "standard" one tableau (masc); and it is with this basic-level noun predicate (though Rosenberg does not use this terminology) that the pronoun //conforms. The case of (28) is more complex, as well as more interesting. On the face of it, the nouns potage (masc) and soupe (fem.) (the latter being the basic-level noun predicate with whose gender the pronoun elle conforms) are perfect synonyms. However, neither term designates exactly the same object: potage is a relatively more recent word, and denotes a "stock in which solid aliments, which are most frequently finely chopped or strained, have been cooked" (Le Petit Robert, 1967); it is a relatively more refined kind of soup, and the term is used as the heading in restaurant menus and cookery books for this particular course in a meal. Soupe, on the other hand, is an older and more "folk" expression, and designates a coarser, simpler dish than potage. The Petit Robert definition is "Stock thickened by slices of bread or solid unstrained aliments". The wider currency of soupe is reflected in the range of expressions, often metaphorical, in which it occurs: un gros plein de soupe.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
(27)
257
4. CONCLUSION
TV's theory that all "true" (i.e. non-deictic) pronouns are controlled by a linguistic antecedent is an oversimplification as well as a distortion of the highly complex and differentiated situation which obtains in actual language use. In many cases, it is the need to derive an interpretation for a pronoun which requires the addressee (as well as the analyst) to infer an 'antecedent' (i.e. a contextually determined interpretation of the pronoun). Thus it is wrong to speak of "linguistic control" in such cases; rather it is the pronoun (or the process of providing an interpretation for the pronoun) which 'controls' or determines the 'antecedent' (this is also B's conclusion in his 1987). In any case, the 'antecedent' is often not simply a noun or a determiner + noun, but a head noun orNP together with predicate modifiers (adjectives and/or prepositional phrases or restrictive relative clauses). Thus the 'antecedent' (i.e., in the framework I am assuming here, the description marking the location of the anaphor's discourse referent within the discourse model) can be quite complex, depending on how detailed the addressee's knowledge of the referent is at the point in the discourse when the pronoun has to be interpreted. This is true of referring pronouns. But in the case of non-referring pronouns (my "strict" anaphors: cf. Cornish 1986:Ch.3), the anaphor has semantico-logical properties and acts upon its governing predicate expression, the result of which then determines a controller, following which the controller's agreement features are transferred to the anaphor. One needs to look at the question of pronoun resolution not just in purely descriptive terms, as TV do (i.e. the problem is not simply one of how to determine the truth-conditional or propositional value of a particular pronoun), but in discourse terms: the question that should be asked is, What is the function of the anaphor in discourse? How does it operate in synthesizing a discourse model from the addressee's point of view? Once one has provided
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
monter comme une soupe au lait, a la soupe!, most of these being colloquial, folk expressions; indeed, the existence of the verb souper (as well as the noun of the same form) designating the entire evening meal, clearly shows that soupe is the unmarked member of the pair. Indeed, the second prisoner in the extract illustrated in (28) can be said to be exploiting this denotational and connotational difference by deliberately using a pronoun whose gender clashes with that of its antecedent trigger's head noun and which thereby raises the basic-level noun predicate soupe (with whose gender it does conform) to consciousness, this term suggesting a coarser, more ordinary referent than the more refined one connoted by the prison guard's somewhat flattering description. This example is thus to a large extent analogous to (26), even though in (28) there is only one relevant discourse referent, rather than two. Both examples point to the crucial importance which the discourse referent's model description has for the operation of anaphora.
258
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
an answer to such questions, the purely propositional or descriptive value in context of the anaphor will simply "fall out" (cf. Hobbs 1979). As B (1987) seemed to be suggesting in his Conclusion, ultimately, the only valid way of investigating the interpretation of pronouns is at the level of actual performance: it is the range of factors that impinge on the processing of a discourse by an addressee which determine how a particular anaphor will be interpreted, and how its interpretation will itself contribute to the further processing of that discourse (including the immediately preceding segment of discourse which has just been processed). Analysing the process of pronoun resolution "statically" in purely competence terms, as TV do, in abstraction from the contextual referential, predicational and situational factors (apart from the saliency in the situation of utterance of the referent of an antecedentless pronoun) which affect it, cannot claim to do justice to this dynamic, flexible and context-sensitive device. Mackay & Fulkerson (1979:669), after a set of psycholinguistic experiments on the processing of the generic personal pronoun he, conclude that "pronouns do not just stand for their antecedents but contribute a meaning of their own which must in some sense dominate the meaning of an antecedent in the interpretation of sentences". There are two basic areas for future research which emerge from the above discussion and debate, it seems to me. One is the question of the nature of the discourse model representation which sanctions the entry in that model of a particular discourse referent. How exactly is such a representation to be derived? How is it to be formulated? It cannot be formulated entirely in terms of a version of the predicate calculus, as Webber (1979) would have it, since, as is quite clear from the discussion about the interpretation of pronouns in languages such as French and German which possess the category of lexically assigned gender, the representation must contain a basic-level head noun together with its lexical gender (and, where relevant, number) feature value, such an element being a linguistic and not a logical entity. Further, how does such a noun become accessible to the addressee and the analyst, and how exactly is it to be encoded in the discourse model representation in such a way that an anaphoric pronoun may refer via it, through its gender (or number) feature value conforming to it? These are crucial questions whose resolution will lead to a greater understanding of the nature of discourse models in general. Obviously, this whole issue is intimately bound up with the phenomenon of reference, naming and predication generally. The second basic area for future research has to do with the role of genderand number-marking in the reference of third person pronouns (as well as of NP-external agreement targets generally - i.e. verbs, participles, predicate adjectives and nominals). Agreement is evidently not a unitary phenomenon, as is clearly shown by the data and discussion presented in Corbett (1983) (see also Cornish 1986:Ch.6), and the 'degree' as well as type of agreement manifested by a particular agreement target is dependent on the nature of its reference. There are at least three distinguishable types of agreement available in the European languages: 'formal-syntactic', 'referential-semantic', and
259 'neutral', and each makes possible the expression of a distinct type of reference. Given that this is so, the question is raised as to what are the necessary conditions which make each of these types possible, and further, as to how the particular agreement features associated with each type relate to the discourse model representation of their referent. Although we now have a clearer idea of the theoretically important issues involved in the complex process of anaphoric reference, it is equally clear that much important work still remains to be done. University of Kent at Canterbury Institute of Languages and Linguistics Cornwallis building Kent CT2 7 NF. U.K.
1. Lambrecht (1981:75-6), in fact, carefully distinguishes between "afterthought topics" (as in (13b')) and "anti-topics" (as in (13b)), arguing that the former involve some form of syntactic or pragmatic deviancy, being separate both syntactico-semantically and intonationally (being both stressed and preceded by a pause) from the clause which they follow. Anti-topics, on the other hand, are always integrated with the clause which they follow, are not preceded by a pause, and are never stressed.
REFERENCES Bosch, Peter 1983: Agreement and Anaphora. Academic Press, London. Bosch, Peter 1984: Coherence and cohesion. Paper presented at the Intern. Conference on Text Coherence at ZiF, Bielefeld, 15-19 October, 1984. To appear in the Proceedings (ed. J.S. Petofi). Bosch, Peter 1987: Pronouns under control? A reply to Liliane Tasmowski and Paul Verluyten. Journal of Semantics 5:65-78. Corbett, Greville 1983: Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers: Agreement Patterns in Slavic. Croom Helm, London. Cornish, Francis 1986: Anaphoric Relations in English and French: a Discourse Perspective. Croom Helm, London. Donnellan, Keith 1966: Reference and definite descriptions. Philosophical Review 75: 281-304. Evans, Gareth 1980: Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11/2:337-362. Halliday, Michael and Ruqaiya Hasan 1976: Cohesion in English. Longmans, London. Hobbs, J.R. 1979: Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science 3:67-90. Kempson, Ruth 1986: Definite NPs and context-dependence: a unified theory of anaphora, Chapter 9 in: Myers, T., K. Brown and B. McGonigle (eds.): Reasoning and Discourse Processes. Academic Press, London, 209-239. Lambrecht, Knud 1981: Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Lyons, John 1977: Semantics, Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. MacKay, D.G. and D.C. Fulkerson 1979: On the comprehension and production of pronouns. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18/6: 661-673. Reinhart, Tanya 1983: Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. Croom Helm, London.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
NOTE
260 Rosch, Eleanor 1978: Principles of categorization, in: Rosch, E. and B.B. Lloyd(eds): Cognition and Categorization. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 27-48. Rosenberg, Samuel 1970: Modern French ce. The Neuter Pronoun in Adjectival Predication. Mouton, The Hague. Sag, Ivan and Jorge Hankamer 1984: Toward a theory of anaphoric processing. Linguistics and Philosophy 7:325-345. Tasmowski-De Rijk, Liliane and Paul Verluyten 1982: Linguistic control of pronouns. Journal of Semantics 1:323-346. Tasmowski, Liliane and Paul Verluyten 1985: Control mechanisms of anaphora. Journal of Semantics 4:341-370. Webber, Bonnie-Lynn 1979: A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora. Garland Publishing Inc., New York. Wiese, Berndt 1983: Anaphora by pronouns. Linguistics 21/2: 373-417.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Journal of Semantics 5: 261-267
BOOK REVIEW Pieter A.M. Seuren, Discourse semantics. Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. Pp. x + 544, £29.50 (cloth). JAMES D. McCAWLEY
(1)
a. John believes that he owns a house, and he believes that it is valuable. D2: believe(d,°,x)
b.
"John"(x)
house(x)
believe(x,D2)
believe(d,°.D2)
house(x) own(d,0.x) valuable(x)
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
In this book (henceforth, DS), Pieter Seuren develops an approach to discourse semantics in terms of the notion of a discourse domain that consists of a set of addresses, each of which is supplied with a set of propositional formulas (I must restrain myself from saying 'propositions', since 'proposition' has a special meaning in Seuren's terminology). As a discourse proceeds, addresses are added to the domain and formulas are added to the addresses. Each address corresponds to an entity to which purported reference is made in the discourse, and the formulas specify the information about those entities that is expressed in the discourse. This picture of discourse structure has much in common with that found in Karttunen (1974, 1976) and McCawley (1979, 1981), except that whereas the propositions that become 'part of the discourse' in the latter works have the status of 'mutual knowledge' (i.e. the participants in the discourse jointly take the truth of those propositions to be 'established' for purposes of the discourse), Seuren discusses 'incrementation' of the discourse domain purely in terms of a single speaker's assertions, without reference to the participation of other parties to the discourse. Seuren's treatment of'intensional contexts' (descriptions of belief, wishes, demands, etc.) is in terms of what he calls subdomains, which are domains subordinate to (not, as the morphology of the word misleadingly suggests, contained in) domains. Each subdomain is made up of addresses and propositional formulas (i.e. it has the same formal makeup as a domain) and is subordinated to another domain in the sense that it corresponds to an address in the subordinate domain, as in Seuren's analysis of one interpretation of (la) as (lb)(pp. 412,414):
262
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The derivation of (lb) involves a step in which thesubdomain is set up (in the interpretation of the first conjunct), followed by a step in which that subdoinain is incremented with the additional information about John's beliefs that the second conjunct provides. The horizontal line separating the formulas in (1 b) corresponds to Seuren's notion of closure. The material above the line plays a role in establishing the identity of the entity that is referred to, while the material below the line is added information about an entity whose identity is taken as independently established. A closed address is one that counts as establishing the identity of the entity in question, and closure is a step in which a given set of information is declared to establish from that point on the identity of the entity in question: "The semantic consequence of closure is that the extension of the address is no longer any arbitrary individual answering to the description but one specific individual rigidly locked onto the address for the duration of the discourse" (p. 318). Seuren distinguishes clearly between 'closure' and 'referent fixing', as where he says about a certain example: "Now, at the point where the newly introduced address... is to be closed, no unique referent is determined, and closure has to take place even though no unique referent is available. We say that in such cases closure takes place and that referent fixing is achieved as soon as the material added by subsequent increments suffices to single out one specific individual" (318-9). Closure establishes an identity but does not establish what individual has that identity; subsequent discourse may accomplish the latter but cannot alter the former.1 I am puzzled by Seuren's repeated insistence that closure does not take place until an anaphoric expression occurs that takes its reference from the address in question. Such a policy would make sense if, say, the referent of a NP could be affected by material intervening between that NP and a pronoun or definite NP that refers back to it; however, Seuren cites no instance of such a phenomenon, and it would take some imagination to conceive of one, since the intervening material would have to have implications about the identity of the referent without making any reference to it. My puzzlement is reinforced by the occurrence of the phrase 'no longer' in the passage quoted in the middle of the last paragraph, which suggests that until closure (which, according to this policy, could well occur several sentences past the place where the address is introduced) "any arbitrary individual answering to the description" given by the accumulated propositional formulas at that address can be picked as the referent. As far as I can see, Seuren's general approach would work equally well if closure followed immediately upon understanding of the expression that introduces the address, with all subsequent information available for use in repairing guesses that turn out wrong as to the identity of referents. There is an important respect in which (lb) is problematic. Note that the same symbol D2 appears both in the second argument position of'believe' and as the address of the subdomain. What happens in examples in which, unlike (la), where the same 'intensional' predicate occurs twice, different predicates occur that refer to a single non-real 'world'?
263 (2)
a. John believes that he owns a house, and he is convinced that the house is valuable. b. Harry is under the delusion that he has a sister, and he recently has come to the conclusion that she has been sending him anonymous letters. c. Prof. Smith demanded that Louise rewrite her thesis, and he suggested that she be careful to keep it less than 400 pages long.
(3)
John knows that he owns a house, and he believes that it is valuable.
It is not clear to me why a subdomain for 'know' need be set up at all: while there can be mismatches between entities believed to exist and entities that exist and thus a need to recognize a separate domain of entities believed by John to exist, there cannot be mismatches between entities known to exist and entities that exist, since what is known in a world has to be true in that world. One quite innovative proposal in DS is Seuren's treatment of negative sentences that serve to reject presuppositions of the negated sentence, as in his analysis of (4a) as (4b) (p. 331):3 (4)
a. The king of France is NOT bald: there is no king of France! b.
*d0 KoF(x) 'bald(x)
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The complements of delusion and conclusion in (2b) both provide information about what Harry believes, but neither of those two items can be treated as having the whole of that information as the semantic interpretation of its complement (not all beliefs are delusions or conclusions, nor are all conclusions delusions). Here Seuren has conflated two notions that have to be kept separate if an enterprise like his is to be viable, namely on one hand the complement of a 'world-creating' predicate such as believe and on the other hand the (possibly voluminous) information that the discourse provides about the world that that complement describes. In (1 b) the second argument position of 'believe' should be filled not by D2 but by a formula corresponding to 'd,° owns a house', D2 should appear not in place of that formula but as an index on it, and in the description of D 2 , that formula should recur.2 Seuren in fact takes up some examples somewhat like those in (2) but treats them in what strikes me as a quite unenhghtening way, with separate 'subdomains' for each predicate, i.e. in his analysis of (3) (p. 417), he sets up two subdomains, one corresponding to 'know (d,°, x)' and one to 'believe(d,0, x)':
264
(5)
a. Socrates owned a dog and it bit Socrates. b. Socrates owned a dog and it did not bite Socrates.
Seuren rejects, on solid grounds, the analysis in terms of a wide scope existential quantifier that Geach (1972) proposed, and adopts an analysis that involves a narrow scope existential quantifier plus policies whereby 'addresses' are set up and are made available for interpretation as denotata of pronouns. The quantifier that figures in this analysis is not a simple existential quantifier but a special sort of existential quantifier HI whose use is accompanied by the creation of an 'address' corresponding to an entity such as the sentence says exists.4 This is in fact close to the proposal of Donnellan (1978) that ordinary singular indefinite NPsare not existentially quantified at all but simply introduce a new entity into (in the terminology of McCawley 1979) the contextual domain; the corresponding existential proposition then is not the meaning of the sentence but rather an inference licensed by 'existential generalization'. There is one example that Seuren discusses for which I think his claims would have been more plausible had he stuck to this proposal and not partially reverted to a more standard logical analysis. Specifically, Seuren claims that the following sentences "are uttered falsely in any [verification domain] where Ted has two dogs, one fierce and one meek" (p. 465):
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The single asterisk is glossed by Seu'ren as 'minimal negation in D-representations', though it applies not only to the sorts of things one would expect to have negations (propositional formulas) but even, as here, to addresses. Seuren describes the interpretation of * as an 'embargo', i.e. a condition restricting subsequent incrementation of the domain. In this case, the asterisk excludes any subsequent interpretive steps in which an address meeting its description is added to the domain. Unfortunately, the passage in which asterisks are introduced (p. 330) is so compressed and the illustrative material so sparse that the implications of Seuren's proposal are not very clear. I would have greatly appreciated some discussion of how his proposal differs from others that involve conditions under which material that would otherwise be included in an interpretation are excluded (e.g. Gazdar 1979) and of how analyses like (4b) are to fit into an analysis of a relevant stretch of discourse. Since (4a) would normally be used only as a retort to someone's assertion that the king of France is bald, Seuren may intend (4b) as something to be derived from a representation of the utterance to which it is a retort (e.g. can the * on the address be interpreted as the speaker's refusal to admit into the mutual knowledge the address that his interlocutor's utterance would otherwise cause to be added?), but too little is said for me to be sure. One well-known puzzle that recurs at several places in DS is that of how to assign a logical form to (5a) without incorrectly making it inconsistent with (5b):
265 (6)
a. Either Ted has no dog, or it is fierce. b. Either Ted has no dog, or he has a dog and it is fierce. c. If Ted has a dog it is fierce.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Aside from the systematic difference between Seuren's judgements and mine that I remarked on in note 1 (not surprisingly, I would call (6b) true rather than false in the given situation), I find implausible his assimilation of (6a) to (6b). According to the Seuren-Donnellan treatment of indefinite NPs, Ted has no dog is not the negation of Ted has a dog (whose logical form involves Seuren's 31) but rather of something such as Ted has at least one dog whose logical form involves the standard 3. But that means that the logical form of (6a) contains nothing that would provide an address such as would be required for the interpretation of//, and I indeed find (6a) uninterpretable for precisely that reason. My sympathy for the sort of procedural semantics that Seuren develops in DS is sorely taxed by many features that make it far harder to read than it ought to have been. (He understates matters in the preface, where he says that 'Readers will not find this book easy to read'). Both Seuren and his editors at Blackwell are guilty of dereliction of duty for allowing a book to appear that contains a large amount of idiosyncratic novel technical terminology and notation that in many cases is given insufficient explanation and often is not listed in the index or the list of abbreviations.5 This problem is made worse by the fact that many technical terms introduced in chapter 1 are not used until hundreds of pages later (e.g. the symbol V is introduced on page 28, appears again briefly on 33-4, and then does not reappear until page 270; the term 'ruled variable' is introduced on page 114 and then not seen again until page 378). In addition, the exposition of central ideas is often interrupted by long digressions that ought to have been relegated to footnotes that directed the reader elsewhere for fuller details. DS would indeed have been improved considerably if chapter 2 ('Grammar and lexicon', 61-209) had been separated from the rest of the chapters and expanded into a separate book devoted to exposition and advocacy of Seuren's current version of generative semantics;6 even chapter 3 (The logic and semantics of presupposition', 210-313), whose discussion of presupposition in terms of many-valued logic plays a significant role in the later chapters, could well have been shortened considerably in the interests of getting to the central concerns of the book without undue delay: readers must wait over 200 pages before reaching any detailed discussion of discourse. DS takes up a large number of questions of semantics and philosophy of language besides those that I have commented on here. In most cases, Seuren has interesting and stimulating things to say about them. There may well be a lot of valuable material in DS that was so effectively concealed by the obscure terminology that it did not register on me. I hope that Seuren will publish more in this area but that he will have more consideration for his readers when revising his manuscript for publication.
266 NOTES
University of Chicago Dept. of Linguistics 1010 East 59th Street Chicago, III. 60637 USA
REFERENCES Donnellan, Keith 1978: Speaker references, descriptions, and anaphora. In Peter Cole (ed.) Pragmatics (Syntax and Semantics 9). Academic Press, New York. Pp. 47-68. Gazdar, Gerald 1979: Pragmatics. Academic Press, New York. Geach, Peter T. 1972: Logic matters. Blackwell, Oxford. Karttunen, Lauri 1974: Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics. 1.181-94. Karttunen, Lauri 1976: Discourse referents. In J. McCawley (ed.). Notes from the Linguistic Underground (Syntax and Semantics 7). Academic Press, New York. Pp. 363-85. McCawley. James D. 1970: English as a VSO language. Language 46.286-99. Also in P. Seuren (ed.), Semantic Syntax. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974. Pp. 75-95.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
1. Throughout DS, Seuren speaks as if well-formedness of a discourse relative to a context requires that a unique referent for each address ultimately be established. For example, he regards his analysis as supported by the fact that 'It is an interesting corollary of this analysis that if [(5a-b), below] are both true,....Socrates had exactly two dogs" (321). My intuitions here diverge from Seuren's: I see nothing untruthful about a person uttering both (5a) and (5b) as long as Socrates had a dog that bit him and a dog that didn't bite him, even if he had a third dog. 2. A treatment of the complements of world-creating predicates along these lines was first proposed in Morgan 1973 and is further developed in McCawley 1979, 1981. Seuren repeatedly indicates distaste for possible-world semantics and has clearly taken pains to avoid formulating anything in terms of worlds. I sketched this revision of his scheme in possible-worlds terminology partly because I find it easier to do so and partly because my capacity to act as Seuren's alter ego is not up to the task of devising an alternative formulation that avoids worlds; I do not doubt that one is possible. 3. The double asterisk on 'bald(x)' indicates presuppositional failure; the notation is unfortunate, since it could easily be misinterpreted as iteration of the single asterisk. Notational matters are made worse by the occurrence of yet other uses for the asterisk, e.g. 'Given the extensional predicate dog, we can make the intensional predicate *dog...' (433). 4. One must be careful not to misinterpret Seuren's symbol ' 3 1 ' as 'there is exactly one' or 'there is at least one', neither of which exactly fits his apparent intentions, sinceHl says less than the former and does more than the latter. 5. Some crucial terms that are in fact listed in the index are so carefully hidden in it (e.g. 'closure' appears only under 'Addresses, closure of) that they might as well not be there. 6. One thing from chapter 2 that does repeatedly recur in the following chapters is the underlying word order (predicate-first) and constituent structure (no VPs or other 'phrasal' constituents) that figured in such works as McCawley (1970). I now think that most of the arguments that I gave in that paper can more plausibly be interpreted as supporting different conclusions than the one about predicate-first word order (1 would indeed dispute that there is any linear precedence within deep structures). Seuren's principal enterprise in DS, to which logical structure is relevant only to the extent that it draws the right distinctions, irrespective of how it draws them, would have been served at least as well by a notational scheme that was English-like to the extent of recognizing constituents such as VP's and having predicate elements at the beginnings of phrasal rather than sentential units.
267 McCawley, James D. 1979: Presupposition and discourse structure. In C.-K. Oh and D. Dinneen (eds.), Presupposition (Syntax and Semantics 11). Academic Press, New York. Pp. 371-88. McCawley, James D. 1981: Everything that Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, and Blackwell. Oxford. Morgan, Jerry L. 1973: Presupposition and the representation of meaning. University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
Journal of Semantics 5: 268-273
BOOK REVIEW Klaus Robering, Die deutschen Verben des Sehens. Eine semantische Analyse. (Goppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 433). Kiimmerle Verlag, Goppingen, 1985. Pp. iii+447, DM 68 (paper). MAURICE VLIEGEN
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
It is the central purpose of this book to integrate into a unified semanticopragmatic framework a description and analysis of "the linguistic means by which speakers of German report about their own visual perceptions and those of others" (p. 1). Semantics and pragmatics are combined in Robering's (R's) view, which implies that situations in their totality "somehow" (the quotes are R's) belong to the domain of meaning description. The theoretical foundation of R's descriptive model is provided by the "structuralist" concept of theory as developed by Balzer and Sneed among others. In terms of this concept a formal notion of interaction is defined. Situations are treated as temporal sequences of actions by the participating individuals. Actions are analysed into a specification of the actors, of the means used, and the temporal intervals covered by them. Not the actions themselves but only their beginning and end are linearly ordered. The notion of "simple action" is made dependent on the purpose of the analysis: given different intended purposes, alternative "simple actions" can be distinguished. The second chapter defines the structures of semantic interpretation (p. 109): each single interpretation I is a theoretical "completion" in some interaction J. That is, in a specific context I assigns "meanings" to the expressions to be interpreted. All textual information that can be obtained from J can be used by I. Such link-ups between Is and Js are called schemata. A meaning assignment is made in two steps: first, the possible interpretations are specified by application of the relevant schemata, then the actual meanings are assigned to the expressions. Besides the schemata there are other types of connection between Is and Js, in particular the non-transitive relation of semantic similarity (p. 109). This is defined as follows: "two words a and b are semantically similar just in case, given a situation and given a purpose, they can be used with the chance of success". R takes the view that there are no strict synonyms. He sees words as being organised into three dimensional structures: they occupy space in one or more such structures (p. 117). One recognizes the old theory of semantic fields, and also Carnap (1971), where so called "attribute spaces" are proposed. After these theoretical preliminaries, R presents (p. 121) a list of 309 verbs (his word class A), which will be discussed in the remainder of the work. Contrary to the usual practice in lexicological analyses of perception verbs, R includes the following groups:
269
(1)
Er war so betrunken, daG er schon weifie Mduse durch das Zimmer jagen sah. (He was so drunk that he saw white mice running through the room.)
(quoted on p. 134), with its infinitive construction jagen sah, real existence of the object of perception is never guaranteed. A different problem is presented by, e.g.: (2)
Superman bildet sich ein, dali er jeder Person ansehen kann, welche Farbe ihre Unterhose hat. (Superman imagines that he can tell, by seeing a person, what colour underwear this person wears.)
The verb ansehen, in the environment [NP datjve -WH+S] has the factive presupposition consisting of S, with WH replaced by an indefinite element "some". A sentence like Er sieht dir an, wie nervos du bist (He can tell by seeing you, how nervous you are), presupposes that the adressee is nervous to some degree. In sentence (2), however, this presupposition is cancelled by the higher intensional verb sich einbilden (imagine). Such cancellations are well known in the literature on presupposition: phenomena like these fall under the projection problem of presuppositions, R's theoretical stance makes it difficult for him to do justice to facts like these. The next step is for R to establish a leveled classification of word class A. R uses, for the class at hand, 10 levels, whose application conditions are distinct but may intersect. These are R's criteria in this classification: perceiver (P) directs his view into an area G; P's point of perspective; directional relations between P and G; dependency of P and/or G on the spatial relations between them; spatial disposition of G with respect to P; aspect or manner of P's
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
1. verbs that denote or imply a movement of the eye (blinzeln, zwinkern); 2. verbs composed with directional particles (hinaufgucken, hinschauen); 3. modality-independent verbs such as wahrnehmen or perzipieren. Verbs that are unknown to the author on grounds of dialectal status are excluded (p. 161). Remarkably, R simply takes his own idiolect as the database: he does not exclude dialectal words which he happens to know but which may be unknown to other speakers of standard German. It may be observed that this procedure hardly contributes to a better understanding of the factors that play a role in the semantic composition of verbs of visual perception, since it is generally not so that the dialectal words included by R display structures of a different kind. It is R's view that the normal implicature of "veridical" perception can be cancelled by additional linguistic material or contextual factors, usually to do with the mental state of the perceiving subject. In such cases the object of perception does not exist in the real world. This view, however, is not without problems. In a sentence like:
270
(Cl) (C2) (C3)
P and G are sub-events of m; for every moment of the duration of the perception event, P's view is fixed on G; e is visually present to P.
But in special cases, such as, e.g., verbs that imply specific eye movements, this set of conditions will probably have to be modified and extended.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
perception into G; P's attitude with respect to the (real or imagined) object of perception; degree of aperture of P's eyes; apperceptivity of P's perception activity; and the directedness of P's perceptive activity towards an object in G. Further subdivisions lead to a total of 206 subclasses in A. R considers the question of whether this classification could possibly lead to a gradable or even measurable concept of similarity. Given the subjectivity of the judgments in question, the non-occurrence of some predicted uses, and the rather strict hierarchical ordering implicit in the classification, which, according to R, does not fit the class in question naturally, R concludes that such a scaling of similarity is not realistic. Rather, in his view, one has here a heuristic instrument that might be of use in constructing such a more precise scaling. It should be noted that some systematic semantic aspects of the verbs in question have not been taken into account. One such aspect is "(degree of) secrecy" of the perception process. The author then makes another attempt at satisfactory classification: he tries out the notion of "quasi synonymy", which involves a gradable margin of tolerance (p. 301). Again however, R is forced to admit (p. 319) that no fruitful results are obtained this way. He then relinquishes any further attempt to construct a precise similarity measure. All he now aims at is a system of representation of distances in A in terms of Euclidean spaces (quoting Goodman 1951 and Roberts 1969), admitting the programmatic and in part speculative character of the enterprise. In the third chapter an attempt is made to set up semantic dimensions on the basis of similarity phenomena. One question that comes up in this context is whether all elements (items) in A have some common characteristic. As a possible candidate R presents the quadruple < P , e, G, m>, always taken to be present in interactions of visual perception - where " P " stands for the perceiver, " m " for the environment or "milieu", " G " for the area of perception, and " e " for the event perceived. Sets of such quadruples define a four-dimensional space such that each item in A occupies a portion of the space. In order to make this space mathematically homogeneous, R then reinterprets all P, G and m as "events": a sign post, for example, is seen as a "particularly slowly happening event". The question of. whether there is a fixed set of conditions that hold for all uses of all items in A is, in principle, answered in the negative. Yet, in practice, says R, the following three conditions go a long way to meet this requirement, even though for some uses and for some verbs additional and/or modified conditions will have to be formulated:
271 Three kinds of intended objects are then distinguished: -
the intended object of perception is not a sub-event of m; P tries to see something which is not there; - the intended object of perception is in G but not in e: P tries to see something which is there but fails to discover it; - the intended object of perception is both in G and in e: P discovers what he wants to see (p. 349).
(3)
She did not see that it was raining.
Only with an accent on not, together with other contrastive intonational features, can one eliminate such an inference, and an explanation must then be provided: (4)
She did NOT see that it was raining: it WASn't raining!
Moreover, when the Ma/-clause is fronted (topicalized), the elimination of the inference that it was raining is impossible: (5)
That it was raining she did NOT see.
Here, there is no way one can add "it WASn't raining" without contradiction. (See Seuren 1985:226-234 on questions of negation and presupposition.) R devotes special attention to infinitival constructions under the verb sehen, which, he says, have "a closer relation between the contents of the perception and the perceived events" and "a dynamic internal structure" in the perceived events. He does not, however, probe these notions much further. What does result is that an infinitival sentence-type under asee-\erb always entails a rAaf-clause sentence-type under the same verb, whereby it is noted that the //za?-clause in question does not have to be the precise thatcounterpart of the infinitival. For example, (6) does not entail (7), though it will entail a sentence with see as main verb and a some /Aa/-clause as object:
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
The book ends with an analysis of some logical features of, in particular, the verb sehen ("see"). Here, R attempts to develop an intermediate position between on the one hand modality-oriented approaches like Hintikka 1969, 1974, and, on the other event-oriented theories such are found in Martin 1981, Barwise & Perry 1983. One aspect that seems doubtful here is R's acceptance of Barwise and Perry's rule of "negation shift": according to this rule, one may conclude from "p sees that not-A" to "p does not see that A". It should be noted that this type of inference is seriously complicated by the fact that verbs like see give rise to ("carry") a factive presupposition with regard to their object-clause, so that, e.g., (3) will lead one to conclude that it was raining:
272 (6)
Carl saw Susan disappear behind the wall.
(7)
Carl saw that Sue disappeared behind the wall. (English and German behave similar in this respect.)
German Department University of Nijmegen Erasmusplein 1 6500 HD Nijmegen. Netherlands.
REFERENCES Balzer, W. 1982: Empirische Theorien, Modelle - Strukturen - Betspiele. Vieweg, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden. Balzer, W. and J.D. Sneed 1977: Generalized netstructures of empirical theories. Part I. Studio Logica 36. Balzer, W. and J.D. Sneed 1978: Generalized netstructures of empirical theories. Part II. Studia Logica 37. Barwise, J. and J. Perry 1983: Situations and Attitudes. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Care, N.S. and R.M. Grimm (eds.) 1969: Perception and Personal Identity. Cleveland/Ohio. Carnap, R. 1971: A basic system of inductive logic. In: Carnap and Jeffrey (eds.). Carnap, R. and R.C. Jeffrey (eds.) 1971: Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability. Vol. I. University of California Press, Berkeley. Goodman, N. 1951: The Structure of Appearance. Reidel, Dordrecht. Hintikka, J. 1969: On the logic of perception. In: Care and Grimm (eds.). Hintikka, J. 1975: Information, causality, and the logic of perception. In: Hintikka. Hintikka, J. 1975: The Intention of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
In summary one can say that R's work clearly shows what the problems are in any attempt to capture the semantic aspects of a coherent set of verbs in a formal descriptive system. It is no doubt R's merit to have made this clear. One also notes with satisfaction that contextual factors are made to play their role in semantic description and analysis. On the other hand, however, there are too many tiresome garden paths: all too often the reader is told, after having made his way through thickets of formalism, that analyses along such lines are unsatisfactory or otherwise inadequate (e.g. on p. 358: "This procedure may appear illuminating and adequate, yet it has the distinctive disadvantage of failing to work.") One realizes that this book was written as a PhD-thesis, which explains a great deal of its unhappy expository strategies. It remains, nevertheless, a fact that there is a clear unbalance, in this book, between the formalism gone through on the one hand, and the results obtained on the other. Our criticism can be summarized in saying that both this book's title and its subtitle are misleading: the book does not deal with the German verbs of seeing but rather with R's verbs of seeing, and it does not provide a (formalized) semantic analysis but rather a discussion of the problems that arise when one tries to do that.
273 Martin, R.M. 1981: On dialogism and perception: Rivetti-Barbo. In: Martin (ed.). Martin, R.M. 1981: Logico-Linguistic Papers. Foris, Dordrecht. Roberts, F.S. 1969: On the boxicity and cubicity of a graph. In: Tutte (ed.). Seuren, P.A.M. 1985: Discourse Semantics. Blackwell, Oxford. Tutte, W.T. (ed.) 1969: Recent Progress in Combinatorics. Proceedings of the third Waterloo conference. Academic Press, New York.
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011