2.5 Functional preliminaries: Identifying referents
2.5.1 Introduction
e referential property of O that triggers S/A detransitivisation has so far been approximated as specificity. Below are two examples that give a first impression of what this means.
(113) a. Debi-ŋa Debi-ERG seu apple kond-o-ko. look.for-3[s]O-IND.NPST[.3sA] ‘Debi is looking for the/an apple.’
b. Debi
Debiseuapplekon-no.look.for-IND.NPST[.3sS]
‘Debi is looking for apples.’ (elicitation PRAR 2010) (114) a. Abo
nowsameattac-c-o.bring-[1]d[iA]-[SUBJ.]3[s]O ‘Now let’s bring the meat.’
b. Abo
nowsameattac-ce.bring-[SUBJ.NPST.1]d[iS]
‘Now let’s bring (some) meat.’ (elicitation PRAR 2010) e first sentence in each pair is transitive, the second sentence detransitivised. In (113a), Debi is looking for one specific apple, which may or may not be identifiable for the hearer. Similarly, (114a) is about a specific amount of meat. In (113b), Debi is looking for apples in general – there might be one or several. e parallel (114b) is about an non-specific amount of meat – the speaker’s group could bring more or less. ese cursory characterisations already indicate that the kind of specificity that is relevant for Chintang is closely connected to quantification. is connection is especially striking with mass nouns such as sa ‘meat’ but can, as we will see, also be claimed for count nouns such as seu ‘apple’.
In most instances of the transitive frame the English translation has an article (definite or in- definite) on the object, whereas in most instances of the detransitivised frame the zero article is used. is shows that the two phenomena revolve around a similar functional variable, or possibly the same variable with somewhat different seings. Cases of divergence are useful for studying the semantics of S/A detransitivisation more precisely. Below are two example sentences for this, which follow each other in the corpus. Dabaice ‘medicines’ in the first sentence has O-AGR but no article in English. e same word in the second sentence is most natural with the definite article in English but triggers S/A detransitivisation in Chintang.
(115) a. C-o-wakt-u-c-e-ta
eat-3O-IPFV-3O-ns-IND.PST[.3sA]-CONT
dabai-ce. medicine-ns
‘He used to take various kinds of medicine.’ (CLC:appa katha talk.020) b. Ca-saŋa=ta
eat-CVB.FGR=FOCnumd-a-kt-a-lokdo-PST-IPFV-[SUBJ.]PST[.3sS]-CVB.BGRekonediniday a-phe-ce
1sPOR-elder.brother-nsbhaiʔ-niPROX-DIR1
u-thab-a-ci-e.
3[p]S-come.over-PST-COMPL2-IND.PST
‘While he was still taking the medicine (he had got from the hospital), one day my brother’s family came over for a visit.’
In order to explain cases like this one and to get a more precise idea of what specificity means in Chintang, we first need a clear definition that is both strict enough to describe phenomena such as the English articles and flexible enough to account for differences between languages. Below we will not only discuss specificity but also definiteness since that gives us a broader view on the topic and both are closely linked in the literature, anyway.
e categories in question have been among the most intensively discussed in linguistics for more than a century: probably the oldest work which is still of relevance today is Russell (1905),8
two very recent ones Abbo (2010) and Kibrik (2011). ough there has been some progress in that new and sometimes more powerful concepts have been developed to explain definiteness and specificity, research in this area is still hampered by a couple of flaws:
• ere has been what one might call “theoretical wholism”: functional concepts such as fa- miliarity and uniqueness have been viewed as monolithic. Accordingly the discussion has mostly been for or against concepts as a whole, thus preventing a more fine-grained under- standing of definiteness and specificity.9
• Instead of explaining the whole range of definiteness and specificity, many scholars base their discussion on a few very special examples. An early counterexample to this is Hawkins (1978), who has collected and discusses a large amount of diverse examples. However, only recently have there been tendencies to include data from natural language corpora (e.g. Ep- stein 2002, Kambarov 2008).
• ere has been lile comparative work. To my knowledge the only large-scale typological work so far is Lyons (1999), who is, however, theoretically superficial and also does not make clear statements about what unites and what distinguishes phenomena in various languages on the functional side. A more recent milestone has been the book by Kibrik (2011), which is very aware of linguistic diversity and proposes a lot of typological parameters but still is not based on a large set of systematically arranged data itself and has too wide a scope to cover all details. Typological work is urgently needed since definiteness and specificity are by no means exotic phenomena. Apart from the well-known Germanic and Romance article languages, many more exotic languages and families feature articles, too (e.g. Insular Celtic, Arabic, Lakhota…). What’s more, two widespread phenomena are oen linked to these functions, viz. differential argument marking (especially differential object marking, cf. Bossong 1998) and antipassives (Heath 1976, Cooreman 1994).
e third problem is clearly out of scope of the present work – in this section, we will focus on Chintang. e second problem is not a problem for this study since most examples have been taken from the Chintang corpus. As regards the first problem, I would like to briefly sketch below how I believe the discussion can be made more transparent. I will start from an intuitive understanding of definiteness and specificity based on English and will then try to render this understanding more precisely step by step.
2.5.2 e identification process
What are definiteness and specifity about? is question has so far generally been taken to be about the functional factors behind these phenomena. As important as these may be, I believe there is a sense to the question which is prior to them, viz. ‘What are they functions of ?’, or, more precisely, ‘Which cognitive process motivates paying aention to definiteness and specificity?’ is is the process of identifying referents. Speakers mention or imply referents all the time, and hearers have to identify these referents with entities in their own mind. Definiteness and specificity as
8If one takes into account less influential work research on definiteness and related topics dates even farther back – cf.,
for instance, the bibliography in Christophersen (1939).
9One counterexample to this practice is the work of Chesterman (1991), who tries to explain the distribution of the
English articles and the Finnish partitive by combining three functional concepts, viz. (mental) locatability, inclusiveness, and “extension” (a variable indicating whether a referent is instantiated (“actualised”) or not). He then presents a unified theory based on relations between various kind of sets such as (p. 69) the “entity set” and the “referent set”. He does not make sufficiently clear, however, how the three concepts presented first are related to this theory.
2.5. FUNCTIONAL PRELIMINARIES: IDENTIFYING REFERENTS grammatical functions serve to indicate whether and how this is possible. ey are thus about in the first place.
e statements above may seem trivial, but they provide a simple base for talking more system- atically about definiteness and specificity. If the identification of referents is the process motivating these phenomena, the following components may play a role for their explanation:
• Pointing: e speaker points to a referent.
• Enhancement: e hearer enhances the given information concerning the identity of the referent by all available means.
• Identification: Using the combined information, the hearer tries to identify the referent in a mental space.
• Ability estimation: e speaker estimates whether the hearer can do this. Several comments are in place at this point.
e first component might be taken to equal giving a referring expression. In fact, this is what many authors have implicitly assumed, especially those coming from the philosophical tradition or focussing on English (e.g. Chesterman 1991, Gundel et al. 1993, Abbo 2010). However, in many of the languages of the world, the default for given referents in argument roles is not to mark them overtly with a referring expression but to leave them covert. is is why I have chosen the term to cover both overt marking and implication. is issue is highly relevant for Chintang because it is an extreme language with respect to “pro-dropping” (cf. section 2.3.1). It is not only possible and in fact usual to drop any referent that has been previously mentioned in discourse but also to drop referents that have not been mentioned before. For instance, the following sentence is completely normal, whether uered at the beginning or in the middle of a conversation:
(116) Pid-o-ŋs-e.
give-3[s]O-PRF-IND.PST[.3sA]
‘(He/somebody) has given (it/something) (to him/somebody).’
(CLC:CLLDCh2R01S01b.1368) I will use the term below where it is necessary to cover both referring expressions (= overt pointers) and argument roles not occupied by an overt NP (= covert pointers).
e relevance of the second component in the process of referent identification – the enhance- ment of information by the hearer – is directly related to that of the first, because overt pointers oen (if not mostly) do not provide all the information that is necessary for identifying a referent. e important distinction between pointers and what the hearer makes out of them is not always acknowledged in the literature. For instance, Birner and Ward (1994:93) cite the sentence “It’s hot in here. Could you please open the window?” (as uered in a room with three “equally salient” win- dows) as an example for the use of the English definite article with an “entity” that is not uniquely identifiable. However, even though the NP the window does of course not refer to such a unique referent in an arbitrary context, it must do so in the context where this uerance is made, i.e. the hearer has to be able to enhance the given pointer so that one referent emerges as the intended one. If this condition is not given, the definite article becomes infelicitous. If all three windows are closed and there are no other hints to the identity of the window (most importantly the lo- cations of speaker and hearer in the room), Could you please open the window? will most likely result in the reply Which one? us, Birner and Ward’s example only demonstrates that pointers marked by the need not have a uniquely identifiable referent; however, the example is irrelevant for enhanced pointers. is distinction becomes all the more important in a language like Chintang where arguments are covert all the time.
Epstein (2002:337) provides a list of sources of additional information that are widely recognised in the literature:
• previous discourse • situational context
• world knowledge
• bridging (= association based on world knowledge)
e third component of the identification process – identification proper – is the most impor- tant one. Several things need to be said here. First, it is by no means a maer of course that referents are mental entities. ough much of the more recent linguistic discussion of reference (especially in typology) is based on this typically implicit assumption, there are fields (e.g. formal semantics) where it is still highly unusual. What’s more, there is also the philosophical tradition where it is one of the defining criteria of referents that they exist in the real world. For instance, Heim (1983) states that not all indefinite and definite expressions refer and introduces the term “file card” for entities that correspond to NPs uered in discourse but not necessarily to referents in the real world. Chesterman (1991:10) likewise mentions “non-referential” definite expressions and concludes that reference is not important for the description of definiteness. Abbo (2010), which otherwise presents very informed overviews of research into reference and a lot sophis- ticated discussion, does not even mention the possibility that referents might not be real world entities.
e reason why I chose to define referents as mental entities here is a terminological one. Presently there can be no doubt that the inclusion of mental referents is most useful for the de- scription of definiteness and specificity (and probably of any linguistic phenomena related to ref- erence) – for instance, the use of the English definite article in fiction can hardly be explained if one assumes that its use marks identifiability in the real world. However, among the scholars ac- knowleding this so far nobody has produced a comprehensive terminology. What is lacking in particular is a common term for the relation between pointers and entities – if “refer” and “ref- erence” are disallowed for talking about mental entities, various non-technical terms have to be resorted to here. To me it seems easier and clearer to understand reference in a broader sense than to try to find a new term. Kinds of referents can be distinguished by adjectives where necessary (e.g. “real world referents” vs “mental referents”).
Another comment concerns the notion of mental spaces used in the list above. is term was introduced by Gilles Fauconnier, first as “espaces mentaux” in Fauconnier (1984) and later in the now more commonly known translated form in Fauconnier (1994), and has been popular ever since in cognitive linguistics. In discussions of definiteness and specificity it has been used, for instance, by Epstein (1999, 2002) and Kambarov (2008).10Including mental spaces in the description
of identification processes does not only make clear that referents are primarily mental entities but also makes it possible to put into words the difference between classical cases such as “x was the father of Charles II” (Russell 1905:481) and examples such as “He had been an academic gypsy ever since the fire” (Epstein 1999:65, cited from a work of fiction).
In the first example, identification takes place in a mental space that maps the real world. us, the father of Charles II does not only have a referent in the sense adopted here but also in the philosophical sense. By contrast, in the second example the speaker does not know anything about the fire, which is mentioned here for the first time, not even whether it has a counterpart in the real world or not. Its referent is thus only identifiable in the mental space opened by the story.11
Note that “discourse referents” as they are used in Discourse Representation eory (Kamp 1981) or File Change Semantics (Heim 1983) are not exactly identical to mental referents. ere is at least one important difference between mental spaces and discourse, which is that mental spaces may be multiple, so one referent can exist in several linked spaces simultaneously.
If one takes together all the extensions of identifiability made above, one arrives at a concept which is quite far from the everyday understanding of identifiability: the speaker has to give very
10Interestingly, spatial metaphors were already present in the discussion of definiteness before Fauconnier. For instance,
Hawkins (1978) generally speaks of “locating” referents.
11While it is mostly easily possible to identify which mental space is relevant for the identification of a referent, this is
not always the case. For instance, in a sentences like Anybody could do it, anybody may not be identifiable in the base space. However, if the relevant space is the one where it actually happens, it is possible to refer to anybody as to an identifiable referent: Anybody could do it, and then aer that he’d just disappear. Imagine you met that guy. is problem is known as the problem of donkey anaphora (based on the o-cited “Every farmer who has a donkey beats it”) in the literature (cf. e.g. Roberts 2003:321).
2.5. FUNCTIONAL PRELIMINARIES: IDENTIFYING REFERENTS lile to no information, the hearer adds whatever he can from his own knowledge, and identifica- tion only takes place within mental spaces. A beer term might thus be accessibility, as advocated e.g. by Ariel (1988, 1990) and von Heusinger (1997, 2007). I will still stick to the term identifiability because it seems to me that there are important links between the term as it is used here and its more common meaning. Another reason is that proponents of accessibility usually view this as a scalar concept, which to me seems to be a confusion of the notions of possibility and ease of identification.
Finally, the fourth component of referent identification – the assumption of the speaker about the abilities of the hearer – actually comes first in chronological order. Without such an assumption, the speaker could not use linguistic markers of definiteness and specificity. at identifiability is never an objective truth but always filtered by the mind of the speaker becomes clear from cases of mismatches between speaker assumptions and hearer knowledge, e.g. when a speaker asks a hearer Have you seen the book? and gets the answer Which one? Here, the speaker assumed too much knowledge on the side of the hearer. e book was not identifiable in general but thought to be so by the speaker.
It is important that this component does not only concern the knowledge of the hearer but also his assumed ability to adapt to new situations. is is because a speaker may be more or less challenging when he presents a referent as identifiable. He may do so when the present knowledge of the hearer is already sufficient to identify the referent. However, he may also do so when he well knows that it is not but thinks that the hearer is able to orient himself in a mental space that is such that once one is familiar with it one can identify the referent. Situations of the laer type are discussed as “first-mention definites” in the literature.
An example cited by Abbo (2010:220) is “e new curling center at MSU, which you probably haven’t heard of, is the first of its kind”. Here, the speaker marks new curling center at MSU as definite even though he himself acknowledges in the inserted relative clause that the hearer does not have the knowledge to identify it. However, he still assumes that the hearer will be able to construct a mental space where there is only one center that can be talked about. is is evidenced by two facts. One is that he gives some additional hints to the identity of the bowling center – it is new, and it is located at MSU (Michigan State University). Even if a university had several bowling centers, it would be highly unusual if two new ones opened at the same time, so these hints greatly facilitate the construction of a mental space within which the bowling center is identifiable (by contrast, consider how strange e bowling center, which you probably haven’t heard of, is the first of its kind sounds – such usage would only be possible in combination with a great amount of information enhancement from the side of the hearer, but probably not if there is no such information and the speaker wants to prompt the hearer to construct a new mental space). e second piece of evidence is the minimally contrasting sentence A new bowling center at MSU, which you probably haven’t heard of, is the first of its kind. e difference to the first example is not that the bowling