The use and using of expression-types

My overall conception of talk is instrumental, grounded on the locution that we use language, and informed by common-sense considerations concerning how one goes about doing things with tools. We each know one or more languages, those languages contain sentences, and one of the things that we do with sentences is to ask questions with them. There are many kinds of question that we can ask, and the number of sentences available to us is practically limitless. Neither of these considerations seems to slow us down. Somehow, we decide what question we wish to ask and select a sentence, which, when uttered, will serve to ask it.

There are rules speakers follow when selecting a sentence-type to perform a speech-act. To investigate those rules, it is necessary to determine what speech-acts a sentence-type might be used to perform, and what aspects of sentence-types might make them good candidates for the performing of particular speech- acts. Some sentence-types, because they have the structures that they do, lend themselves to the performing of questioning speech-acts. And some questioning speech-acts, because of their nature, are most accurately performed using sentence- types of a particular structure. As already mentioned, undeformed sentence-types such as It’s raining? and You talked to who? lend themselves to the asking of confirmation questions, while deformed sentence-types such as Is it raining? and Who did you talk to? lend themselves to the asking of open questions.

Conventional meaning (and conventional use) are functions of a sentence-type; reference and truth (and occasional use) are functions of the using of a sentence- type. Let me begin with these assumptions, which are, in part, due to Strawson (1950a). Sentence-types have conventional meanings; when conventionally used, they are used with their conventional meanings. Expressions other than sentence- types also have conventional meanings. Lexical items do. The expression ‘cape’ has the conventional meaning ‘promontory of land’; it is conventionally used to mean that. There is a distinct but homophonous expression ‘cape’ that has the conventional meaning ‘sleeveless cloak’, and it is conventionally used to mean that.

The Use and Using of Expression-types 19 A speaker must learn the conventional meanings of expression-types, both sentence-types and lexical items. The learning of the conventional meanings of the vocabulary of a language is, in one respect, a finite task: there is a finite number of items in the vocabulary of any language. To be sure, the learning of the conventional meaning of a vocabulary item is complicated, ongoing, and subject to error. One might, for example, mistakenly think that one conventional meaning of ‘cape’ is ‘bay’ since Cape Cod presents both a promontory and a bay. The Cape of Good Hope would then provide the corrective. And homophony itself is a serious problem; the learner must often decide, in a language such as English, whether she is confronting two occurrences of the same expression-type or not. The difficulties should not be underestimated. But the vocabulary at least has the advantage of being finite.

The learning of the conventional meanings of sentence-types is a different story. The number of sentence-types is infinite, yet sentence-types do have conventional meanings. Compositionality makes this possible. The conventional meanings of sentence-types are determined from the conventional meanings of the lexical items they contain, and the rules governing their combination. But what of conventional use? Over and above the rules determining the conventional meanings of sentence-types, there are rules that determine their conventional uses.¹ These rules fasten on generally defined structural properties of sentence- types and identify the conventional uses of sentence-types that have those structural properties. There are structural properties of certain sentence-types in virtue of which they are candidates for particular conventional uses.

Incomplete sentence-types are conventionally used to ask open questions. I am suggesting that there is a rule of sentence choice that fastens on structural incompleteness and says of those sentence-types with that property that they may be conventionally used to ask open questions. For that to be the case, structural incompleteness must be identifiable across the infinite range of sentence-types. That is possible because structural completeness can be finitely defined. The syntax of a natural language itself provides the grounds for a finite definition of syntactic incompleteness: in English, a sentence-type is syntactically incomplete if it presents an application of wh-movement or inversion. Since the syntax of natural language is recursively defined, it is possible to identify an unlimited number of instances in which either wh-movement or inversion apply.

In contrast, there is no structural property of sentence-types used to ask confirmation questions that signals that those sentence-types are conventionally used to ask confirmation questions. In particular, these sentence-types are not structurally incomplete; rather, the incompleteness inheres in the using of the sentence-types chosen for asking them, not in the sentence-types themselves. In

¹ Of course, if the doctrine were that conventional meaning is conventional use, this could not be said. I am distinguishing them, taking the conventional meaning of a sentence-type to be part of its grammatically determined structure.

John saw who? a wh-expression fills object position; in It’s raining?, the glue is in place. These sentence-types are, in a way that I will explicate in Chapter 3, complete. Some might think that the contrast between It’s raining and It’s raining? is given, if not syntactically, at least phonetically, in terms of rising intonation, and might therefore claim that both open questions and confirmation questions owe their statuses as open questions and confirmation questions to grammatically determined properties of sentence-types after all. I will argue that this view is false to the facts, and that rising intonation, despite appearances, is not a grammatically determined property of sentence-types used to ask confirmation questions. There is no conventional meaning, or structural characteristic, determined of sentence- types, in virtue of which they are conventionally used to ask confirmation questions. In my view, the use of confirmation questions is not conventional but occasional, determined in the asking of them.

Confirmation questions are directed not toward the completion of sentence- types but toward the completion of utterances. To a great degree, they address the infelicities identified by Austin (1962). The sentence-types used to ask them are complete. But, in the using of them, the speaker presents himself as lacking the relevant required intentions or as being unable to avoid a hitch or a flaw. An utterance, in particular an assertive utterance, to be felicitous, must be accompanied by certain beliefs, and must be said completely. The absence of either of these constitutes an incompleteness in the assertive event.

Many of the sentence-types used to ask confirmation questions have other uses as well. Perhaps most noticeably, the sentence-types used to ask yes-no confirmation questions may also be used to make assertions. The question then comes whether declarative sentence-types have conventional meanings closely identified with their assertive use. If one group of sentence-types may be used both to ask confirmation questions and to make assertions, it may be doubted whether declarative sentence-types have assertive conventional meanings at all. Indeed, I do doubt this. Let us agree that the term ‘declarative’ should not suggest that there is some aspect of meaning in virtue of which a sentence-type, containing an expression or expressions with that meaning, is, or can be, used to make an assertion. Rather, declarative sentence-types are those sentence-types that are, or can be, conventionally used to make assertions. I can then theorize that in the asking of a confirmation question, one selects a declarative sentence- type, whose conventional use is assertive, in order to ask a question, the occasional use of which is confirmatory. On this account, occasional use and conventional use can coexist and yet diverge. Here, we have a sentence-type that has one conventional use, being used in an utterance with a distinct occasional use. I think that is probably the best way to express how at least some confirmation questions work. The occasional uses of confirmation questions depend on the (distinct) conventional uses of the sentence-types used to ask them. And, since matters of reference and truth arise in the using of sentences, not in their use, it follows that matters of truth and reference arise in the asking of confirmation

The Use and Using of Expression-types 21 questions in a way different from the way in which matters of truth and reference arise in the asking of open questions, a point that will be explored further in Chapter 3.

I assumed in the previous paragraph that one of the conventional uses of declarative sentence-types is to make assertions. And I suggested that one of their occasional uses is to ask confirmation questions. Are there other uses, either conventional or occasional, to which declarative sentence-types may be put? Certainly. Declarative sentence-types may be used to suppose. They may be used to propose courses of action and to express opinions. A speaker may use declarative sentence-types to perform a wide range of speech-acts. Which of these uses are conventional and which occasional is far from clear. One might wish to claim that the assertive speech-act is somehow primary, but that would have to be argued empirically. Here, apart from taking on some suggestions found in Austin (1953), I will not attempt an exploration of the assertive speech-acts.

A few words about terminological choices seem necessary at this point. Strawson (1950a), especially section II, although the source of much that I assume, comes to a somewhat different set of terminological choices from what I do. I agree with him that one should take seriously what it is ‘natural’ to say about using sentences and about uttering them. However, I have partially different views about what is natural, and have slightly different goals. It is central to Strawson’s concerns to explicate the expression ‘same use of a sentence’, where the term ‘sentence’ may be replaced for clarity by ‘sentence-type’. Suppose speakers A and B use sentence-type S at the same time to say something about the same person. Then, according to Strawson, they have made the same use of S. On the other hand, if A and B use the sentence-type S at the same time to say something about different people, they have made different uses of S. Because a sentence such as I am hot, even if used at the same time by A and B, says the same thing about different people (A and B), as Strawson wishes to speak, no two people can ever make the same use of the sentence I am hot.

How would this terminological decision play itself out in other domains? Suppose that I use wax to seal my letters, and that you use wax to seal yours. Extending Strawson’s terminological proposal from the use of sentences to the use of wax, it would seem that we do not make the same use of wax. Just as, in the sentence case, you use the sentence-type I am hot to speak of yourself and I use the same sentence-type to speak of myself, so in this case you use wax to seal your envelopes and I use wax to seal mine. Now I think this is a very narrow restriction to place on the use of the expression ‘same use’. A broader way to talk would be to say that we made the same uses both of wax and of the sentence I am hot: each of us to seal his letters, and each of us to say that he is hot, respectively. This broader usage would seem to be the usage of common talk. It is allowed on this broader usage that one sentence-type may be used to express distinct propositions, and further that, when this occurs, the uses of them may, nevertheless, be the same. Sameness of proposition does not follow

from sameness of use. It serves Strawson’s purposes to concentrate on the use of a sentence-type, as opposed to the using of a sentence-type. The use of a sentence-type is something it has even if it has never been used. The using of a sentence-type is an event which consists in the sentence-type being used. As I have said, I believe both notions are needed to account for questioning. The question for me is not only whether a sentence-type has a particular conventional use, but also whether a sentence-type, having the conventional use that it does, can have a certain occasional use, a matter of particular concern in the case of confirmation questions.

A final point on Strawson: he considers it natural to say that the same sentence is uttered on different occasions. For clarity, I have decided to exclude this way of speaking. I agree that this usage is common shorthand, as when I say that you and I own the same book if we own copies (tokens) of the same book (type), a reading that many expressions allow in many environments. Strictly speaking, though, a speaker uses types but never tokens and utters tokens but never types, a point I will return to. There are various questioning speech-acts, in the performing of which various tokens are uttered. And there are various sentence-types that are used when these speech-acts are performed.

In this chapter, I must bring use and grammar under one analytical vocabulary. Since Austin (1962), the things that we use sentences to perform have been called ‘speech-acts’. The question before us is how speakers choose among sentence-types to perform speech-acts, and specifically questioning speech-acts. The domain of sentence-types and the domain of speech-acts have been explored, at least in part. On the side of sentence-types, linguistics provides us with an account of their syntactic structures, and there are various positions within linguistics as to how those structures are assigned meanings. On the side of speech-acts, we have the study of pragmatics. But I need to have a way to talk about talk that bridges the two domains, and unites their contributions. Here there is some work to do, for there is the tendency within each field to believe that all of language can be handled with the analytical tools available to just that field. To a significant extent, each field sees language in its own terms only. But there is a very clear connection between them, a connection which accepts that the two domains are distinct. That connection is that the objects that linguistics studies are the objects that speakers use, and the objects that speakers use are among the objects that pragmatics studies.

Those objects are sentence-types; when we talk, we use sentence-types. There is much within that formulation that demands clarification. One word to become clear about is the verb ‘use’, and another word to become clear about is the noun ‘sentence’. We need a more general view of instrumentality, a more general conception of what using consists in. With that perspective, we can then discern how using sentences is like the using of other kinds of things, and how using sentences is a special kind of using. Regrettably, the verb ‘use’ has not received fair attention. But while the expression ‘sentence-type’ is a technical term, and

The Use and Using of Expression-types 23 can be awarded a regimented sense ad lib, the verbs ‘use’ and ‘utter’ apparently occur in discussions of these domains with their common-English senses. What are those senses? We should consider how common English deploys the verbs ‘use’ and ‘utter’ in general. Furthermore, in the case of sentence-types and sentence-tokens, we should consider common-English talk about types and their tokens. One question that arises here is whether, when talking of tool-using generally, we would commonly say that people use types or tokens. Admittedly, common speech is not the last word on the subject of sentence-use, or the type-token distinction (or anything else, for that matter). But, as Austin once quipped, common usage is the first word on this and other subjects, and it is in any event a good idea to keep tabs on common usage when prying into scientific matters, if only to guard against bringing in unnoticed assumptions.

So: Given the syntactic frame ‘X uses Y in order to do Z’, where in place of ‘X’ we may have the name of an agent, and in place of ‘Z’ we may have the name of an act, what may be replaced for ‘Y’? A name of a tool. Now, how do we talk about tools? Do we, for example, say we use tokens, types, or some other thing entirely? And in the specific case in which, in place of ‘X’, we have the name of a speaker and, in place of ‘Z’, we have the name of a speech-act, with what may we replace ‘Y’? These questions concern what used to be called the selectional restrictions of the verb ‘use’. If ‘use’ were not so important a word, a word as important, in this area, as ‘mean’ and ‘refer to’ are in semantics, the interest of this topic would be lexicographical only. Here, however, getting clear on these points is central to settling theoretical terminology. Must we have a regimented sense for the verb ‘use’, or is its common sense adequate? To investigate this, we must consider common talk concerning instrumentality, and common talk concerning types and tokens.

2 . 1 . 1 C o m m o n t a l k o f u s i n g t y p e s a n d t o k e n s

Let’s begin by considering common type-token talk about matters other than language use.² Take talk about books. I might say You and I have read the same book. There are two circumstances under which my statement might be true, either we both read the same physical item (I lent it to you when I finished), or we read different tokens of the same type (perhaps you, a paperback and I, a hardcover). Even, in the second case, if I read it in English and you read its translation in Russian, it would still be commonly said that we read the same book. (This point is underlined by the fact that, if you read The Idiot in Russian, and I read a bad translation in English, you could protest It’s not the same book!) So there are circumstances in which, when speakers use the word ‘same’, they might either mean to reintroduce the same item or to say of an item that it belongs

to the same type as another item does. I will call that the ‘same-token/tokens-of-