The grammar of reference

We have argued that any content word acquires its forms of referentiality on an occasion only as a function of the grammatical relations into which it comes to enter, rather than in virtue of its lexical specifications, which do not predict its referential functioning (with‘compositionality’ as no solution to this problem, we have sug- gested). That reference is not lexical is shown by the fact alone that any word that can be used to refer can also be used to predicate, an insight that, as we have illustrated above, even applies to indexicals and the personal pronouns, which are reckoned the most deictic of devices in language. Reference is in this sense a grammatical category for us, part of what we have called the ‘content’ of grammar, as is its inverse, predicativity. Reference moreover appears as the most basic grammatical category, around which all other grammatical functions revolve, with the grammatical process itself terminating in the assignment of a truth value.

But we haven’t shown yet how exactly reference arises from grammar. None of the above would be of much interest if, after a word enters the grammatical process, it could become referential in just any way, or in ways we cannot correlate with its specific grammatical behaviour. Instead, however, what we will see in this chapter is that the grammar narrowly constrains the ways in which words can be used to refer, making available a small number of discrete options in which this can happen, organized in the form of a hierarchy, ranging from purely predicative nominals to quantificational, to referential, to deictic, and finally to personal ones. Higher forms of referentiality in this sequence entail lower ones, and none are lexical. Again, nothing in semantics per se predicts either of the constraints in question or their hierarchical organization.

We will describe these options and how they arise, as induced by a simple principle: the gradual movement of lexical material to the‘edge’ of the phase. In this sense, we say that reference is induced ‘topologically’. The term ‘topology’ indicates the possible transformations (or deformations) of a given geometrical

object, while leaving its basic identity intact (invariant under the transformations in question). In the case of grammatical reference, the geometrical object is the phase. Its internal composition and the ways in which this composition can change induce, we shall see, distinctions that we can then describe formal-ontologically, and that we find formalized in one way or another in virtually any formal semantic theory of natural language, like the distinction between a proposition and a property, or an event and a truth value. We will conclude that the grammar of human language organizes a formal ontology of this kind, which as such provides a framework of thought: a system in which thought can arise. This topological approach to reference builds on and reformulates pioneering work of Longobardi (1994; 2005), which we here expand and implement in a way that directly connects with the phasal approach we have taken in Chapter3.

How the grammatically available forms of reference for a given word are induced is also independent of its so-called ‘lexical category’, i.e. its part-of-speech status (in particular, whether it is a noun or a verb). Noun-headed structures are surely different from verb-headed ones—for example in that the former are necessarily contained in the latter, and only the latter are truth-evaluable. However, this is not a consequence of a lexical‘N-feature’ or some lexically specified ‘reference feature’, but of the grammatical fact that the nominal phase is normally thefirst in the grammat- ical process and the clausal one is the last. Moreover, as we shall see, the way in which different kinds of referentiality are induced grammatically for both kinds of lexical heads is the same. Reference is a consequence of the phasal topology, not the categorical label‘Noun’, which we have characterized in Chapter 2 as a morpholex- ical manifestation of grammatical relations in which a particular lexical item tends to stand.

In a similar way, the traditional term ‘adjective’ encodes words primarily func- tioning predicatively, being confined to the ‘interior’ of the phase; and ‘verb’ is a traditional term denoting words that can enter thematic, aspectual, and propositional relations. A consequence of the present approach, thus, is that no other category than the one basic category of referentiality (and its inverse, predicativity) is in fact needed: the so-called‘lexical’ categories, N(oun), V(erb), and A(djective) can all be reduced to language-specific morpholexical markings of universally available under- lying grammatical relations needed to establish forms of reference.

Speaking of formally distinct types of referents such as‘objects’ or ‘propositions’ is to use the traditional philosophical and ontological terms, and talk of‘reference to’ such ‘entities’ has traditionally been taken to induce ‘ontological commitments’ to entities of these various formal types. Given the present grammatical approach, the situation is different: the burden of this chapter is to illustrate how acts of reference involving the formal ontology in question are governed by narrowly grammatical principles. They therefore induce ontological commitments only within a formal frame given by grammar. Once this system is in place, existence of entities falling

under the formal types in question can be discussed, and existence—say, of the Eiffel tower, or Bolt’s winning in the Olympics—is not then a question of grammar any more. The system of formal categories itself, however, into which these existentsfit, is not independent of grammar.

The logic of the chapter is to firstly embed Longobardi’s (2005) Topological Mapping Theory (TMT) into our phasal architecture in Section4.2, and then to expand it to the referential possibilities that are configured grammatically in the domain of clauses, showing that the principles for establishing forms of reference are the exact same ones there, following Sheehan and Hinzen (2011), in Section 4.3. We then propose a further expansion to the domain of pronouns and clitics, which we here, based on Martín and Hinzen (2012), argue in Section 4.4 to go strictly beyond the ontology that we see in the domain of 3rd-person object reference tackled in the previous section. In line with our approach above, also the forms of reference exhibited by indexicals crucially cannot be understood or explained (non- grammatically) semantically. In fact, with the personal pronouns, the referential potential of grammar comes to a peak, and the same topological mapping principles are exploited here again. In this way, the chapter traces the genesis of referentiality from its weakest form—purely predicative and non-scope taking nominals—all the way to its strongest form—the referentiality of the 1st-person pronoun ‘I’. Since the semantics of the personal pronouns connects very directly to foundational issues in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, notably the existence of‘selves’ as objects of reference, the extension of the TMT into this domain goes a long way towards establishing the goal of this book at large: to demonstrate the epistemological significance of grammar.1