Re: Determining Definiteness (in P.Noms)

From: Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Date: Mon Jan 05 1998 - 17:34:10 EST


At 03:17 PM 1/5/98 EST, Paul S. Dixon wrote:

Rolf (I think) wrote:
>>I will illustrate the importance of other factors for than the clause
>>for determining definiteness/indefiniteness, by introducing the physician
>>Jim Smith and his lawyer friend Paul Jones, both living in the US. When
>>Paul says: "I am going to the hospital", the words "the hospital" may be
>>indefinite or definite, depending on whether he has a particular
>>hospital in mind. When Jim speaks to his wife and utter the same words,
>>"the hospital" can only be definite, because he works at the particular
>>hospital which he has in mind. A knowledge of the world is important!

>I'm thinking when he say, "I am going to the hospital," that he knows he
>is going to a particular hospital, not any hospital, even though he may
>not consciously know just which one. It is still definite.

Hmmmm....

Isn't this referential vs. attributive use of a definite noun phrase, which
is still definite? A few items from the Lexicon of Linguistics
("http://helpdesk.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/~rustless/ling/Lexicon_of_Ling/"):

Referential use

SEMANTICS: the use that a speaker makes of a definite noun phrase when he
uses the content of the noun phrase to identify an individual. The definite
noun phrase in The murderer of Smith is insane is used referentially when
the speaker intends to refer to a particular person which he knows to be
the murderer of Smith. Donnellan (1966) distinguishes the referential use
of definite noun phrases from their ˇattributive use.

Attributive use

SEMANTICS: the use that a speaker makes of a definite noun phrase to say
something about whatever fits the description of the noun phrase. The
definite noun phrase in The murderer of Smith is insane is used
attributively if the speaker does not intend to refer to a particular
person which he knows to be the murderer of Smith (that would be the
ˇreferential use), but to the (possibly unknown) person who murdered Smith,
whoever that person may be.

In the case of the sentence "I'm going to the hospital", the doctor may
have told me that I'm going to the hospital, but perhaps I do not know
which one. I am going to "the hospital" that my doctor is sending me to,
and using this definite phrase referentially. This is different from "I am
going to a hospital", which is indefinite.

To argue that "the hospital" is indefinite in these sentences is to argue
that the definite article in English does not grammaticalize definiteness;
if you do that, you will have a lot more explaining to do ;->

 
>Well, yes, I did kind of think that the rule was tautologous or
>self-evident. But, Jonathan did ask for a rule, and I couldn't resist.
>
>The "only if" part of the rule is admittedly the most challenging, but I
>am still looking for an exception to it.

Paul,

I've been thinking about this for the last few days. I think that this test
still involves a *subjective* judgement in the mind of the interpreter, and
I'm not sure that two different interpreters will always agree whether two
substantives are interchangeable. And the criteria for interchangeability
can not be determined from actual language usage, but only from the logical
world view of the interpreter (I make the assumption that formal logic does
not determine the structure of languages). That's why I would prefer tests
that make predictions about what constructions in a given language will be
(un)grammatical based on a set of proposed semantics - it is easier to
falsify, and validation can be done using predictions that can be tested
with a text corpus.

Jonathan
 
jonathan@texcel.no
Texcel Research
http://www.texcel.no



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