Abstract
I argue that predicativism, the view that proper names are predicates, is a viable theory of the semantics of proper names given a certain hypothesis about the grammar of definiteness. Extant versions of predicativism hold that a singular name in argument position constitutes the predicative component of a covert definite description. I show that these versions cannot accommodate semantic and typological data, specifically: syntactic and semantic disparities between bare and non-bare occurrences of such names in English, the distinctive modal rigidity displayed by names, as opposed to common noun definite descriptions, and cross-linguistic data that feature seemingly distinct determiners for names in argument position. I propose that predicativism needs to embrace a view of definite marking as complex, consisting of a definite article and a bindable, familiarity-tracking constituent, which I call index. I show that this view is empirically motivated and typologically attested. The resulting version of predicativism can accommodate elegantly the observed semantic data when coupled with language-specific morpho-phonological generalizations. I finally address criticisms of and alternatives to my version of predicativism.
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Notes
This point can be cashed out in two ways: one stronger form of descriptivism posits that the semantic content of a name just is that of a definite description: names are synonymous with definite descriptions. A weaker form of descriptivism posits that a definite descriptions merely fixes the referent of the name, but otherwise the content of the former is different from the content of the latter.
As opposed to common mass nouns like “money”, “information”, etc. Henceforth, I will say common nouns suppressing the countability aspect.
This may strike us as suspicious, if not circular, if we think there is some kind of constitution relation between being referred to by “N” and being called N: something is called N in virtue of the fact that “N” refers to it. Aware of this worry, Fara argues at length that the right-hand side occurrence of “N” in the condition above is used, not mentioned, in a so-called small clause construction. The idea is that “called” as in a sentence like My parents called me John, is akin to the copulative “made” in being a two-place relation relating the subject “my parents” to a proposition with a subject, “me”, and a property of the subject, “John”. Fara’s broader point seems to be that being called N expresses a substantive property not to be analyzed in terms of a condition that quotes the name, i.e. not in terms of being referred to by “N”.
A question remains which has not, to my knowledge, been addressed by the-predicativists: why is the definite determiner never phonologically null before nouns so that we have [[[the\(_{\emptyset }\)] Dog] runs] just as we have [[[the\(_{\emptyset }\)] Socrates] was a philosopher]? A parallel observation about that-predicativism is found in King (2006). Note that this divergence is not syntactic but phonological. The most likely explanation is that within the class of common nouns, there is still something morpho-phonologically distinctive about names which is associated with the possibility, only for them, of a null definite article. See Sect. 5.1 for a few further details on this point. At any rate, I consider this objection to be about the phonological conventions of English, if anything, akin to asking why “amn’t” is not an available contraction of “am not”.
The English data are truly messy. Fara proposes that modifiers which precede singular names must appear with an overt article, and her argument for that turns on the conjecture that all the\(_{\emptyset }\)-permissive modifiers are also the-permissive while admitting a non-restrictive interpretation. The tendency seems to be that restrictive modifiers trigger phonological surfacing of the article.
English, of course, has expressions such as “The Ukraine”, “The Holy Roman Empire”, etc.— these however do not seem to be bona fide proper names, but rather definite descriptions. For discussion, cf. Rabern (2015).
To be precise, they use the sentences “In every race, the colt won” and “In every race, John won” respectively, where the quantifier phrase occurs inside a PP. In my opinion, this introduces an unnecessary, for my purpose, complication, so I have recast the examples in a simpler and more tractable form.
To my knowledge, no predicativist has considered donkey-anaphora with names, except for Gray (2017). However, Gray recommends idiosyncratic predicativism, which postulates that the determiner sister of bare names is neither a demonstrative nor a definite article, but a sui generis determiner. This approach fully defended by Muñoz (2019), is discussed in Sects. 3.3 and 6.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this important issue which has transformed this paper in invaluable ways.
This is typically implemented by postulating a variable somewhere in the syntax of the DP, whose value is contextually determined. Von Fintel (1994), Stanley and Gendler Szabó (2000) claim that it is an \(\langle e, t \rangle \)-type variable. Others claim it is a situation variable: e.g. Schwarz (2012), Elbourne (2013).
For example, Fering, a Frisian dialect, possesses two distinct morphemes that appear to encode definiteness, namely “a” and “di”. Intuitively, the former corresponds to uses of definites as described by the uniqueness-based approach, while the latter to those uses of definites that are better understood as familiarity-based. More examples come from Standard German, Lithuanean, Mauritanian Creole, and other languages (Schwarz, 2019a). In Standard German, the definite article morpheme, in the uniqueness case, contracts with nearby prepositions into a single morpheme (namely “zum”: “to the”) and, in the familiarity case, remains un-contracted (namely “zu dem”: “to the”). This is different from the other languages cited, in which Schwarz (2019b: 15–19) notes contrasts between a bare and a non-bare manifestation of semantic definiteness (corresponding to uniqueness and familiarity, respectively) in Akan, Mauritian Creole, Lithuanean, among others.
A reviewer notes that languages realizing definiteness in one way may count automatically as A-languages whereas those that have distinct definite articles vs. other items with names can be B- or C-languages, the last two being distinguished by whether the relevant item tracks uniqueness, rigidity, or familiarity.
Even if the other side of the debate is right, the-predicativism can still stand its ground: it can maintain, at a bare minimum, that it is a thesis about DP languages only. This does not conflict with its central insight that names are to be semantically analyzed as common nouns. The question how definiteness is achieved for names in non-DP languages is as open as it is for all other common nouns in these languages. I leave the details of implementation to future research.
As a reviewer has emphasized, my use of the terms “referential” and “attributive”, as well as the distinction drawn through them, diverge significantly from Donnellan’s use of the terms and his own distinction. Crucially, Donnellan’s construal of referential uses of definite descriptions allows for the possibility that the descriptive material is not actually satisfied by the intended referent. I am not committed to that, and indeed the semantic entry for the index below captures a notion of “referential reading” according to which this cannot happen. That said, my referential/attributive distinction (not uncommon in the linguistic literature) does not depart completely from Donnellan’s spirit, as it tries to isolate and emphasize what I take to be an aspect of his distinction, namely the extent to which contextual information, especially in the form of familiarity, is implicated in the identification of the intended referent.
The attributive/referential distinction just mentioned is thereby encoded semantically as well, though it does not map onto the index constituents as neatly: while a zero-familiarity index does correlate with attributive uses, some cases of non-zero familiarity—i.e. of strong familiarity—are also attributive.
Stojnić et al. (2017) claim that pointing gestures are in fact grammaticalized and their semantic function is to introduce an object as a discourse referent, one immediately and, actually, mandatorily accessible by immediately downstream referential expressions.
This entry is not exactly new. It is inspired by Elbourne’s (2005), which likewise employs two kinds of indices, positive and the 0 index, as sisters to the definite article. It also makes the assignment function g relevant to the semantics of positive indices, but irrelevant to the 0 index. However, his entry requires changing the type for the definite article as well as a different traces-and-pronouns rule (than the standard one found in Heim & Kratzer (1998) and does not capture the modal facts noted below, as it is fully extensional.
In cases of c-command by a higher quantifier, given a \(\lambda \)-abstract \(\lambda _{i}\), we have \(g' = g[i \rightarrow x]\). The extension of the c-commanded clause is of type \(\langle e, t\rangle \), i.e. a set of individuals and in this sense a ‘multitude’. The dynamic case is more complicated, but again a notion of ‘multitude’ (of assignments) can be discerned: a discourse containing the antecedent and the bound definite is not functional, but relational, relating the original g to exactly those \(g'\)s which assign the same individual to the anaphor as g does to the antecedent.
I am very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this astute observation and the example below.
Some empirically-based arguments for the existence of monsters can be found in: Schlenker (2003) based on Amharic, Anand and Nevins (2004) based on Zazaki, and Deal (2014) based on Nez Perce. A more theoretical argument can be found in Rabern (2013) who argues that even quantifiers can be seen as monsters.
Even though such an entry correlates more neatly with the three-way distinction between strong, weak, and zero familiarity, it would introduce a three-way ambiguity. It also seems to lack significant empirical corroboration, except perhaps from Ahn (2017). More seriously, I am uncertain whether it remains properly compositional: In order to interpret the index, speakers would need information that is not strictly local, i.e. whether it is bound or not. Further, syntactic structure would be playing a role in determining not only the meaning of a complex expression (e.g. the entire definite) but also of the constituent expressions (i.e. the index), since the same syntactic constituent would be interpreted one way in a binding environment and a different way in a non-binding environment. Still, the idea of rules of composition which genuinely add meaning in the course of composition has been defended (e.g. Glanzberg & King, 2020).
Substituting “the Gerontius” in 51 seems grammatical, though judgements are hesitant. This may be due to a default preference for the the\(_{\emptyset }\) in the absence of competition, as in the race cases above.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for inspiring the observations of this and the next paragraphs.
I cannot ignore here a critical and until recently (cf. Ninan, 2019; Schoubye, 2020) neglected point about the interaction of names with epistemic modals (as opposed to metaphysical modals, arguably involved in the examples above). The point at stake here is that names under epistemic modals do not appear to be rigid. For example, Ninan (2019) observes that if Satoshi Nakamoto (as the hitherto unknown inventor of bitcoin is known) is not in fact Elon Musk (a plausible candidate) then the following sentence is predicted to be false, given rigidity, even though it is standardly judged to be true:
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(i)
Elon Musk might be Satoshi Nakamoto, but (then again) Elon Musk might not be Satoshi Nakamoto.
The account given here can piggyback for a solution on the very account given in Schoubye (2020), who, in turn, piggybacks on the account of pronouns given in Santorio (2012). The latter effectively argues that epistemic modals, unlike metaphysical modals, can shift the assignment function parameter (as well as the world parameter) of the interpretation function. This would explain the lack of rigidity of names, since names, like third-person pronouns, only depend for their interpretation (at least for some indices, on my view) on the assignment function. I defer to the cited authors for the details of the formal implementation and its philosophical significance. The apparent non-rigidity of names under epistemic modals does not require a change in our semantics of names, but rather in our semantics of the modals themselves.
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(i)
Just like the Spanish honorifics, and unlike definite articles, the authors argue that these items are not pluralizable, cannot appear before restrictive modifiers of a noun, and cannot introduce relative clauses. Bernstein et al. (2019) analyze them as classifiers, ClassP: [DP D [ClassP CL en-na / don-doña [NP N ] ] ] [...] the [+FAM] feature of the classifier indicates acquaintance with the speaker, [...] not unlike that expressed by definite articles [+SPEC, +DEF]. They say:“It is not surprising then that this feature redundancy in the DP system led to replacement of the classifier with the definite article (el/la) in many varieties of Catalan.”
For arguments in favor of the hypothesis that determiners are modified pronouns, see Höhn (2017: 169).
Höhn observes that third person APCs as a means of definiteness marking have been observed in Australian languages and Sepik languages (see Höhn , 2017: 69-70, and references therein).
In Old Norwegian, as Kinn (2016) observes, we find examples where the third-person singular pronoun “hann” co-occurs with a common (non-family) noun, also marked for definiteness with a definite article.
cf: “Vi
strákurinn föru” (’The boy and I will go.’) in Sigur
sson & Wood 2020.Schoubye (2020) seems to bite the bullet on this. He appeals to a psycho-linguistic explanation given by Gundel et al. (1993), according to which in cases like this speakers have a psychological preference for the pronoun as opposed to any other referential expression, such as a name, a definite, or a demonstrative. Schoubye contends that “when an intended referent is highly activated [...] a pronoun is preferred over names and descriptions because they place less cognitive demands on processing.” But why should names be more cognitively demanding for processing? In fact, third-person pronouns seem to require a lot more presuppositional processing than names, according to his entries.
The constraints may be pragmatic: The definite description contributes descriptive content to the truth-conditions, in addition to the referent. In constructions like 80 and 81, this would be pragmatically faulty since the earlier pronoun requires that the intended referent is already accessible via the contextual knowledge, so the descriptive content, in case of co-reference, would be superfluous, at least for identificatory purposes.
strákurinn föru” (’The boy and I will go.’) in Sigur
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Partial financial support was received from the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning (ECOM) 2019 Summer Research Fellowship.
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I am grateful for their help, feedback, support to Delia Graff-Fara, Malte Willer, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Stefan Kaufmann, Magda Kaufmann, Dorit Bar-On, Lionel Shapiro, William Lycan, Stewart Shapiro, Michael Glanzberg, two anonymous reviewers for Linguistics and Philosophy, as well as audiences at Madrid, Lisbon, UConn (Storrs), and Yale. I am also grateful for a 2019 grant by the ECOM research group.
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Agolli, E. The complex lives of proper names. Linguist and Philos 46, 1393–1439 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09389-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09389-y