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part2- 15. The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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15. The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Black...
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15. The Pragmatics of Deferred
15. The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation
Interpretation
GEOFFREY NUNBERG
Subject
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00017.x
1 Deferred
1 Deferred Interpretation
Interpretation
By deferred interpretation (or ÑdeferenceÒ) I mean the phenomenon whereby expressions can be used
to refer to something that isn't explicitly included in the conventional denotation of that expression.
The interest in these phenomena stretches back to Aristotelian discussions of metaphor, and while
the study of the mechanisms of deference has made considerable progress in the interval, that
(literally) classical framework still underlies a lot of the assumptions that people bring to the
phenomena. So it will be useful to address some of these legacies from the outset.
Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an
essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect.
For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that
are stylistically notable Ï the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like
Ñfiguratively speaking.Ò There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a
British soldier and using suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in, ÑA couple of suits stopped by to
talk about the new productsÒ). What creates the stylistic effect of the latter is not the mechanism that
generates it, but the marked background assumptions that license it -here, the playful presupposition
that certain executives are better classified by their attire than by their function. Those differences
have an undoubted cultural interest, but they don't have any bearing on the more pedestrian question
of how such usages arise in the first place.
1
This assumption about the stylistic role of figuration is closely linked to a second assumption of
traditional approaches, the idea that deference is exclusively a pragmatic phenomenon. For example,
Grice (1967) treats metaphor as a kind of conversational implicature that arises from a violation of the
maxim of quality; on his view, metaphorical utterances invariably have a literal reading to which a
truth value (usually, false) can be assigned and which constitutes the input to some inferential schema
that generates a ÑsecondaryÒ figurative reading. The assumption is that deference is somehow
inconsistent with conventionalization, so that we can say that a word has distinct lexical meanings
only when the connections that once licensed its multiple uses have been somehow obscured or
forgotten. That is what often leads people to characterize polysemy in diachronic terms and to talk
about figurative meanings that have been lexicalized as ÑdeadÒ or ÑfrozenÒ metaphors. As Ravin and
Leacock (2000) put it: Ñpolysemes are etymologically and therefore semantically related, and typically
originate from metaphorical usage.Ò But statements like this are better thought of as origin myths
than as analytic hypotheses.
2
In fact, our assumption that such-and-such a usage is lexicalized is
very often based on no more than an intuitive sense of its stylistic effects or an observation of its
frequency, rather than on any strict analytical criteria.
But from a linguistic point of view, there's no reason to distinguish between the mechanisms that
operate within the lexicon to produce meaning extensions and those that operate in a purely
pragmatic way. Figuration doesn't necessarily cease to be figurative just because it is subject to some
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conventionalized restrictions. What leads us to say that the processes that produce multiple uses of
expressions are lexicalized is not that they are no longer transparent (they may very well be), but only
that the language constrains or enriches their use over and above what could be predicted on
pragmatic grounds alone. Conventionalization should not be confused with absolute arbitrariness; it
makes more sense to think of deference as a process that is orthogonal (or more accurately,
heterogonal) to the pragmatic mechanisms that give rise to deferred readings, analogous to other
productive derivational processes. And conversely, the mere fact that a particular usage is both
frequent and stylistically unremarkable doesn't necessarily mean that it is lexicalized (even if that
criterion may lead lexicographers to include it in their dictionaries).
A further problem with the traditional view of deference is in the way it classifies the deferred uses of
expressions, according to the conceptual relations or correspondences that they manifest.
Synecdoche, for example, is defined by the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in part,
as Ña figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole.Ò Over and above the obvious category
mistake here Ï what the dictionary means, of course, is that synecdoche involves using the names of
parts in place of the names of wholes Ï there are reasons for keeping these relations distinct from the
purely linguistic mechanisms that exploit them. For one thing, a single mechanism may exploit
several distinct figures. There may be no purely linguistic reason, for example, for distinguishing a
traditional synecdoche like blade for ÑswordÒ from a metonymy like crown for ÑmonarchÒ or a
metaphor like wolf for Ñrapacious person.Ò
3
And conversely, a single conceptual correspondence
might figure in two distinct kinds of deferred interpretation. For example, the perceived relation
between newspaper publishers and their products makes possible two interpretations of the objects
in (1) and (2):
(1) Murdoch bought a newspaper last week.
(1) (pointing at a newspaper) Murdoch bought that last week.
Still, there are reasons for believing that (1) and (2) involve different linguistic mechanisms, the first
affecting the use of descriptive terms and the second the use of demonstratives and indexicals.
Finally, we will see that linguistic mechanisms of transfer are subject to certain constraints which
aren't necessarily implicit in the conceptual relations they depend on, but which require the
introduction of independent principles.
2 Meaning
2 Meaning Transfers
Transfers
With this as backeground, we can turn to the linguistic mechanisms that license the deferred uses of
expressions. In this article, I will concentrate on the mechanism I will refer to as
MEANING
TRANSFER
,
which underlies what we ordinarily describe as the metaphorical and metonymic uses of names and
descriptions. I will start by discussing meaning transfer as a purely pragmatic process, then turn to
the way it is implicated in various lexicalized rules and schemas, and then finally discuss its
application to some long-standing questions in syntax.
Meaning transfer is the process that allows us to use an expression that denotes one property as the
name of another property, provided there is a salient functional relation between the two.
4
These
relations can obtain in virtue of a direct correspondence between properties, when one property calls
up another that it resembles (as in metaphor) or evokes (as in synaesthesias like a blue mood). When
we use the word horseshoe to refer to a logical operator shaped like a horseshoe, for example, we
exploit a relation that can be characterized without reference to the circumstances of any particular
horseshoes or any particular typographical marks. Or the relation can be mediated by relations
between the bearers of the properties. This is what underlies transfers involving metonymy and
synecdoche, such as when we use the word novel or the name of a particular novel to refer to the film
rights to a work, as in ÑSpielberg bought the novel for $1 million.Ò In that case we exploit a
correspondence that holds between distinct instances of film rights and distinct novels: there is
exactly one of the former for each of the latter. In what follows I will be mostly talking about the
second sort of transfer, but everything I say will apply with appropriate modifications to transfers of
the first kind as well.
Meaning transfers can apply to predicates of any kind, whether lexical or phrasal, and whether used
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attributively or predicatively. By way of developing some of the features of the process, let's consider
(3):
(3) I am parked out back.
One might be tempted to say that the transfer in (3) applies to the subject I, in a sort of Ñdriver for
carÒ metonymy. But there are a number of reasons for assuming that the transfer here applies to the
conventional meaning of the predicate. For example, if the speaker has two cars, he wouldn't say:
(4) We are parked out back.
though of course this would be an appropriate utterance if there were two people who were waiting
for the car.
5
Note, moreover, that we can conjoin any other predicate that describes the speaker, but
not always one that literally describes the car:
(5) I am parked out back and have been waiting for 15 minutes.
(6) *I am parked out back and may not start.
For both these reasons, we assume that the predicate parked out back in (3) carries a transferred
sense, which contributes a property of persons whose cars are parked out back.
Meaning transfer operates not just on the meanings of predicates or verb phrases, but on the
meanings of common nouns, as well, whether they appear in predicate position or referring position.
Take (7), as uttered by a restaurant waiter:
(7) Who is the ham sandwich?
The process of transfer is straightforward here; from the point of view of the waiter, at least,
customers acquire their most usefully distinctive properties in virtue of their relations to the dishes
they order. But in this case, unlike the Ñparked out backÒ examples, the relevant property is expressed
by a common noun, which can equally well be used as the content of an NP in referential position in a
sentence like (8):
(8) The ham sandwich is at table seven.
In (8), the predicate ham sandwich has a transferred meaning, where it contributes a property of
people who have ordered ham sandwiches.
6
3 Conditions on Meaning Transfer
As I noted earlier, meaning transfer is possible when there is a salient correspondence between the
properties of one thing and the properties of another, in which case the name of the first property can
be used to refer to the second. With an utterance like I am parked out back, for example, we begin
with a functional correspondence between the locations of cars in a lot and the properties of the
owners or drivers of these cars. When two property domains correspond in an interesting or useful
way Ï of which more in a moment Ï we can schematize the operation of predicate transfer as follows:
(9) Condition on Meaning Transfer
Let P and P' be sets of properties that are related by a salient function g
t
: P ҄ P'. Then if F is a
predicate that denotes a property P Ӥ P, there is also a predicate F', spelled like F, that denotes
the property P', where P' = g
t
(P).
7
A correspondence of this sort can hold in either of two cases. Sometimes there is a direct functional
relation between two sets of properties, as in cases of metaphor and synaesthesia Ï for example in
the relation between grades of temperature (cold, cool, warm, hot) and the affects they bring to mind.
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In other cases, though, the correspondences between properties are mediated by correspondences
between their bearers, which is what underlies metonymic and synecdochic transfers. There is no
direct correspondence between the property of being parked out back and the distinguishing property
of any particular person, save via the relation between a person and the thing that has that property.
We can represent this particular case of meaning transfer as follows:
(10) Metonymic Transfers
Let h be a salient function from a set of things A to another (disjoint) set of things B. Then for
any predicate F that denotes a property P that applies to something in A, we can represent the
meaning of a derived predicate F', spelled like F, as in either a or b:
a. ̀P. ̀y (Ӟx
[dom
h]
. h(x) = y ҄ P(x))
b. ̀P. ̀y (Ӡx
[dom
h]
. h(x) = y and P(x))
Note that this entails that predicates of this type are in fact ambiguous between ÑuniversalÒ and
ÑexistentialÒ readings, depending on whether all or only some of the bearers of the original property
are in the inverse image of h for a given value. And in fact both types of reading are generally
available. In cases like ÑI am parked out back,Ò we would normally assume that the speaker means to
say that all the (relevant) cars he is looking for are parked out back, as in (10a).
8
By contrast, when a
painter says, ÑI am in the Whitney,Ò she doesn't imply that all her paintings or even all her relevant
paintings are in the Whitney, but only that something she painted is in the Whitney, as in (10b). And
when an accountant says of her firm, ÑWe are in Chicago,Ò she might intend either interpretation,
depending on whether she's talking about all of the firm's offices or merely about one of them. Still, it
is more useful to think of these two types of readings as two ways of instantiating the general schema
given in (9), rather than as two distinct conditions that license predicate transfer. Meaning transfer is
a single linguistic process.
4 The
4 The Criterion of Noteworthiness
Criterion of Noteworthiness
The schemas in (9) and (10) do a reasonable job of representing the truth conditions associated with
utterances like ÑI am parked out backÒ and ÑI'm in the Whitney,Ò but they miss some important
pragmatic conditions on the use of such utterances. For example, suppose my car was once driven by
Yogi Berra. Then according to the conditions in (10), I should be able to use the name of this property
to describe the property that I acquire in virtue of my relationship to my car. But it would be odd for
me to say:
(11) ?I was once driven by Yogi Berra.
even in a context in which it might be relevant to say, ÑMy car was once driven by Yogi Berra.Ò By the
same token, a painter might say with reference to one of her paintings, ÑI'm in the Whitney Museum,Ò
but not, ordinarily:
(12) ?I'm in the second crate on the right.
Intuitively, the difference is this: when a painting goes into a museum its creator acquires a significant
or notable property, whereas when it goes into a crate she doesn't, at least not usually.
9
Let me describe this condition by saying that predicate transfer is only possible when the property
contributed by the new predicate is Ñnoteworthy,Ò which is to say one that is useful for classifying or
identifying its bearer relative to the conversational interests. In this sense noteworthiness is
equivalent to what Downing (1977) meant when she said that novel noun-noun compounds must be
Ñappropriately classificatory,Ò and to the conditions that Clark and Clark (1979) observed on the zero-
derivation of English verbs from nouns. The fact that the criterion is applicable here demonstrates
that the transfer process creates new predicates with new meanings, just as other derivational
processes do.
10
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It is important to bear in mind that noteworthiness is not the same thing as relevance, though it is
clearly a related notion. In this connection, consider (13) and (14), adapted from Jackendoff (1992):
(13) Ringo was hit in the fender by a truck when he was momentarily distracted by a
motorcycle.
(14) ?Ringo was hit in the fender by a truck two days after he died.
Let's assume that these utterances exemplify transfers of the meanings of the relevant relational
expressions Ï that is, that Ringo denotes the singer rather than his car.
11
The difference between the
two cases is that when a truck hits Ringo's car while he is driving it, the event will probably have
important consequences for him as well: he is likely to have been startled, or annoyed, or put to
trouble and expense. Whereas once Ringo is dead, the things that happen to his car don't generally
invest him with any properties worth mentioning.
12
But while the distinction is intuitively clear, our
ability to characterize it formally requires that we be able to distinguish between the relevance of a
proposition (e.g. that Ringo's car was hit) and the relevance of its trivial entailments (e.g. that Ringo
has the property of having had his car hit). It may be that a suitable version of relevance theory will be
able to clarify this distinction, but for the present purposes we can just take noteworthiness in an
intuitive way.
13
5 Predicate Transfer in Systematic Polysemy
The availability of transfer for common nouns, adjectives, and other lexical categories is what
underlies the patterns of lexical alternation that have been described using such terms as Ñregular
polysemyÒ (Apresjan 1973), Ñdeferred referenceÒ (Nunberg 1979), Ñsemantic transfer rulesÒ (Leech
1974), Ñsense transferÒ (Sag 1981), ÑconnectorsÒ (Fauconnier 1985), Ñsense extensionsÒ and Ñlogical
metonymiesÒ (Pustejovsky 1991, 1995, Copestake and Briscoe 1995), Ñlexical networksÒ (Norvig and
Lakoff 1987), ÑsubregularitiesÒ (Wilensky 1991), and Ñlexical implication rulesÒ (Ostler and Atkins
1991) Ï not to mention just plain ÑmetonymyÒ and ÑmetaphorÒ (see, among many others, Lakoff 1987).
Needless to say, there are many differences among these approaches, both formally and in the data
they are invoked to explain. But they all involve the same type of generalizations, which can be
phrased as implicational statements of the form: ÑIf an expression has a use of type U, it also has a
use of type U'.Ò For example, the name of a writer can be used to refer to his or her works, a word that
denotes a periodical publication or kind of periodical publication can be used to refer to the
organization that publishes it; and a word that denotes a kind of plant or animal can refer to its meat
or substance (this latter is the rule called ÑgrindingÒ).
(15) Proust is on the top shelf.
(16) The Chronicle (the newspaper) opposed the highway project.
(17) We were eating chicken on tables made of oak.
Many of these rules are much more general in their application than the examples we have been
discussing, and require no specialized context to license them. The correspondence between the
properties of dishes and customers provides a useful means of identification only in the domain of a
restaurant, and then only relative to the interests of waiters Ï we could think of usages like these as
examples of Clark and Clark's (1979) Ñcontextual expressions.Ò In general, we don't think of these as
involving lexical senses of the items in question: their number is too open-ended, and their use tends
to be restricted to particular types of contexts or subcommunities of speakers.
14
But the property correspondences that license the transfers in (15)Ï(17) hold across a wider range of
situations, and provide a more context-independent way of classifying the bearers of derived
properties. In these cases we may very well want to say that the transferred predicate represents a
lexical sense of the item in question, or at least deserves listing in a dictionary.
15
To a certain extent,
this is a relative matter. For example standard dictionaries often assign the word white a sense like ÑIn
chess, the person playing white.Ò They do this because even though the correspondence between a
color and a role is context-specific, the derived predicates white and black are much more generally
useful for classifying chess players than the property of having ordered a ham sandwich as a means of
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