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A note on referent identifiability and co-presence
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Journal of Pragmatics 8 (1984) 649-659 North-Holland
A NOTE ON REFERENT
John A. HAWKINS
IDENTIFIABILITY
AND CO-PRESENCE
*
It is often suggested (most recently by Clark and Marshall (1981)) that there are restrictive conditions on the appropriate use of definite descriptions, involving ‘referent identifiability’ or ‘co-presence of the speaker, the hearer and the object referred to’. The purpose of this note is to argue that such conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient and miss a significant pragmatic generalization about appropriateness. A more abstract alternative is summarized in which the universe of discourse is structured into sets of objects defined pragmatically as well as logically. These pragmatic sets fix the boundaries relative to which the uniqueness of singular definite descriptions holds, and speakers exploit these sets when making their references unique and unambiguous for the hearer. Some examples are discussed which suggest that the recognition by the hearer of the intended pragmatic uniqueness set is a crucial part of what is claimed to be ‘identifiable’, whether or not the referent itself is simultaneously ‘identifiable’ or ‘co-present’. The more restrictive conditions that appear to hold are automatic consequences of real-world differences between the pragmatic sets involved, and to include them within an account of the pragmatic meaning of definiteness as such is to put too much real world knowledge and inference into the language.
It is generally assumed in the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature that the appropriate use of a definite description requires some form of ‘identifiability’ by the hearer of the object referred to. Defining what it means for something to be ‘identifiable’ is, however, no easy matter. Demonstrative expressions with this and that are more restrictive in their identifiability requirements than definite expressions with the. And these in turn reveal an almost baffling array of usage possibilities, from the strongly deictic at one end (pass me the bucket) to the idiomatic and almost indefinite at the other (I was on the train yesterday). As a result, an adequate definition of identifiability covering every single use of a definite description is probably doomed from the start. Nonetheless, the majority of uses do have very clear conditions of appropriateness involving some form of identifiability, and it is therefore important to try and define this term for the clear cases at least. Clark and Marshall (1981) have * Author’s address: John A. Hawkins, Max-Planck-Institut fur Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693, USA. 037%2166/84/$3.00
0 1984, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
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recently offered a definition in terms of different types of ‘co-presence of the speaker, the hearer and the object referred to’. The purpose of this note is to point out that Clark and Marshall’s characterization, like many others before it, seems to be too restrictive and misses a significant generalization about what it is that the speaker assumes to be identifiable to the hearer when using a definite description. Some examples are discussed which are exceptions to the co-presence conditions, and a more abstract generalization is proposed which subsumes both the exceptions and the more straightforward cases. Undoubtedly the fundamental insight about the meaning of singular definite descriptions is that the object described by e.g. the king of Frunce is unique (cf. Russell (1905)). As fundamental as this insight is, however, it prompts the question: ‘Unique in what sense’? For a speaker can refer using the king or the president, even though there are currently many kings and even more presidents that he knows of, knows that his hearer knows of, etc. And all but one of these potential kings or presidents is excluded from the reference on each occasion of use, and the speaker is understood to be referring to e.g. the Ring of France, or the President of the United States. But what are, in general, the parameters relative to which singular definite NPs refer uniquely? And how are these parameters invoked in actual language use, in order to achieve unambiguous definite descriptions? How, in short, is the universe of discourse structured? Within model-theoretic semantics, the universe of discourse enumerates the objects in terms of which the logical language is to be interpreted. Such objects are thereby ‘classified’ on the basis of the predicates that are true of them. For example, a one-place predicate (such as president) defines a set of individuals, those having the relevant property, a two-place predicate (e.g. see) defines a set of ordered pairs of objects, etc. Hawkins (1978) argues that a more realistic universe of discourse should be divided into sets on pragmatic grounds as well (cf. also McCawley (1979) for a similar proposal). The logical predicates will define further sets and groupings within these pragmatic sets, but it is the pragmatic sets which actually define the parameters relative to which the uniqueness of definite descriptions holds. Among the officiaries of the United States there is only one president, for example, though in the world at large there are several. What kinds of pragmatic sets are there? Numerous examples were given in Hawkins (1978) (the term used there is ‘shared sets’), and Clark and Marshall (1981) draw extensively on these in developing their co-presence theory. But whereas Hawkins’ theory attached crucial importance to the existence of such pragmatic sets within the universe of discourse, arguing that an overall definition of identifiability must make reference to them (cf. the term ‘location’ of the referent within a shared set), Clark and Marshall in effect revert to the more traditional view that it is the objects themselves that have to be identifiable or co-present. And Hawkins’ different pragmatic sets are used only
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to illustrate different types of referent identifiability or co-presence, and so play a quite secondary role. Yet there are many examples of definite descriptions which do not lend themselves to this reduction. At the risk of repetition I would like to return to some of them in the present context. The matter is of some importance since it raises the general question of what we mean by ‘identifiability’, and different conclusions have evidently been drawn from a similar body of data. Hawkins (1978) argued, for example, that the visible situation of utterance constitutes one of the pragmatic sets relative to which uniqueness may be interpreted: pass me the bucket will be ambiguous for the hearer if there is more than one bucket in the field of vision. Clark and Marshall talk here of the ‘physical co-presence’ of the speaker (S), the hearer (H), and the object referred to (within the immediate, potential or prior field of vision). It was also argued that the objects talked about between a given speaker and hearer will constitute a pragmatic set relative to which uniqueness can be interpreted: previous reference to a bucket permits subsequent reference to the bucket - if more than one bucket has been talked about, the bucket will be ambiguous through non-uniqueness. Clark and Marshall talk here of the ‘linguistic co-presence of S, H and R ‘. These are the classic examples of anaphoric or ‘second-mention’ the. More frequent than either of these two cases are definite descriptions whose parameters of uniqueness are defined on the basis of a more general type of mutual knowledge, such as the fact that the set of officiaries of America contains a (unique) president, etc, which sanctions a first-mention use of the President. Similarly, after referring to a wedding, the speaker can immediately talk of the bride, and also of the bridesmaids and the cake, because all members of the relevant linguistic community know that the set of things which make up a wedding typically includes these. And when one goes to a wedding one can ask Z wonder who the bridesmaids are? even if they are not yet physically present. In Clark and Marshall’s terms, mutual knowledge of the referent is no longer direct in these examples, since the referent is neither visible nor previously mentioned, but derives from S’s and H’s ‘co-membership’ in various communities, all members of which share certain types of information. The referents of the bride, the bridesmaids, the president, etc, are therefore ‘indirectly co-present’ with S and H, as a result of this more general mutual knowledge. In Hawkins (1978) the use of the definite article was argued to be theoretically revealing since it gives direct insight into the structuring of the objects of the universe to which speakers and hearers ‘appeal’ when making their definite references unique and unambiguous. The visible situation uses are the least interesting in this regard, because the structuring is imposed by the physical situation itself, and whatever objects it happens to contain. Anaphoric uses are more interesting, since every speaker typically keeps a record of the objects
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that he has talked about with each hearer, together with the properties that hold of each. If speaker A has talked to hearer B about some professor, and to hearer C about a different professor, reference to the professor will be perfectly successful in an A and B dialogue and in an A and C dialogue, since uniqueness holds within each of the previous discourse sets, even though A knows more than one professor. And if both professors are linguists, and A and B share previous discourse knowledge of only one such, whereas A and C share previous discourse knowledge of two linguists, the linguist will be a successful reference from A to B, but not from A to C (cf. Hawkins (1978: 108-110)). But it is the definite descriptions based on more general, community-derived knowledge that are the most interesting of all. The structuring that underlies such sequences as a wedding: the bride (or a house: the roof; a ship: the captain; a book: the author, etc.) looks at first like nothing more than a reflection of some kind of whole-part relationship between objects, which could be just as easily determined by examining the objects themselves, rather than uses of the definite article. But this impression is oversimple. The definite descriptions are first of all highly hearer-sensitive: for example, a linguist does not meet a historian at a party and use a grammar: the deep structure sequences, invoking the latter on the basis of the former. The structurings that a speaker invokes for each hearer will generally be a proper subset of those that he alone possesses knowledge of. These structurings can also be at variance with reality: Z inspected a house, but didn’t like the door is perfectly appropriate, even though houses invariably have more than one door. And finally, there is no simple condition, such as the whole-part relationship, which underlies these structurings. Sequences like a car: the steering wheel are plausibly analyzable as whole and part, but a car: the weight is not, since weight is an attribute and not a part. Nor is high frequency of co-occurrence a necessary guarantee of co-existence in a common set. Clark and Marshall (1981: 41) point out that a candle has only a likelihood of having a wrapper associated with it, and only a low possibility of being made of bayberries, and yet Z bought a candle yesterday, but the wrapper was torn and Z bought a candle yesterday, and the bayberry smelled great may both succeed. On the other hand, in the following example prior reference to a car sanctions immediate reference to the exhaust fumes but not to the dog, even though dogs are quite often seen in cars, and the car in question was clearly one that did have a dog in it: (1) The man drove past our house in a car. The exhaust fumes were terrible. (2) The man drove past our house in a car. ?The dog was barking furiously. These examples all suggest that the mental representations of the world that humans derive from their experience of reality reflects complex organizing principles based on numerous criteria (logical, functional, quantitative), which
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aggregate over many instances. representations and aggregations
and co-presence
Minsky (1975) has discussed such in terms of the notion of a ‘frame’:
653
mental
Here is the essence of the theory: When one encounters a new situation one selects from memory a substantial structure called a frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary. A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation. like being in a certain kind of living room, or going to a child’s birthday party. Attached to each frame are several kinds of information . We can think of a frame as a network of nodes and relations. The ‘top levels’ of a frame are fixed, and represent things that are always true about the supposed situation. The lower levels have many terminals - ‘slots’ that must be filled by specific instances of data. Each terminal can specify conditions its assignment must meet. (Minsky 1975: 212)
Minsky’s discussion is very suggestive, even though (as Dresher and Hornstein (1976) point out) he applies his frame idea far too broadly. Nonetheless, it helps us to understand the appropriateness difference between (1) and (2). The sequence of (2) is inappropriate, not because the hearer is reluctant to believe that the car in question did contain a (unique) dog, but because the ‘car frame’ of S’s and H’s general community knowledge does not contain one. The frame idea also helps us to clarify the identifiability issue. Hawkins (1978) argued that definite descriptions need not be identifiable to the hearer in the same way that demonstrative expressions are, because of such contrasts as don’t go in there (said to someone walking up a neighbour’s drive) that dog will bite versus the dog will bite. Visibility or audibility of the dog is required for the former, but not for the latter, which merely informs the hearer that there is a dog in the relevant vicinity. Clark and Marshall (1981: 45) acknowledge this distinction, but they argue that the definite referent must still be at least indirectly identifiable or co-present, on the basis of mutual knowledge that e.g. a house may often contain a dog. However, even the weakest definition of identifiability or co-presence can be shown to be neither a necesssary nor a sufficient condition for the appropriate use of the. But what is both necessary and sufficient, I will suggest, is recognition of the appropriate uniqueness set or frame. That identifiability of the referent is not necessary can be seen in examples where the hearer can ‘locate’ the referent in the appropriate set, even though he knows absolutely nothing about the relevant object, and has not the slightest expectation that such an object could be a member of such a set. Consider a notice such as beware of the lion attached to a house gate. However unexpected this might be, it is still a perfectly appropriate definite description. Beware of the dog is more normal, by contrast, and may be said to activate certain mutual expectations. Yet the two examples are understood in the same way - there is a dog/lion existing within a context that the hearer can readily infer (the house), and he should beware of it. Or consider an actually attested example from a conversation with a doctor just after a serious injury to my right arm: you’ue severed the ulnar nerve. I did not have the faintest idea what an ulnar nerve
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was, but I was able to infer that it was a (unique) part of my right arm. In Minsky’s terminology, I as hearer could be said to be adding a new lower level terminal to my ‘arm frame’! Such examples are not infrequent. The hearer must be able to know where the referent exists, and what it is unique to, or else the definite description will be inappropriate [l]. But over and above that, any additional mutual knowledge or mutual expectations about the referent may not be required. Conversely, identifiability is not a sufficient condition for the use of the. The best example I have here involves certain NPs in predicate nominal position. Imagine the following scene. You are having your first driving lesson, and the instructor is pointing out the various parts of a car to you using locutions like that’s the gear lever, that’s the clutch, that’s the ignition key, etc. He could also use the indefinite article on these occasions, that’s a gear lever, There are some apparent counter-examples to the claim that uniqueness within a pragmatic set is a prerequisite for appropriateness. We have already considered one type of example in which the speaker’s and hearer’s mental representation of objects, reflected in their linguistic utterances, is at variance with reality: I inspected a house, but didn’t like the door. Houses invariably have more than
[l]
one door these days. More typical of this type of discrepancy are examples where the predictably occurring ‘part’ within a ‘whole’ is very often unique, but by no means invariably so: Arriuing in an unknown town, I looked for the bookshop, or: Harry bought a book and was rmpressed by the author. Towns may have more than one bookshop (depending on their size), and books are increasingly multi-authored. But the conception of reality that native speakers adopt and which they reveal in their language use is one which aggregates over such diversity in favour of a uniqueness relationship. Uniqueness does still obtain in these examples, therefore, within the mental structuring of the universe that speakers and hearers have mutual knowledge of. A second class of counter-examples is discussed by Lyons (1980). Lyons points out that close the door can be appropriately uttered when the room in question contains three doors, only one of which is open. And pass me the spanner can be appropriate when three spanners are lying around, only one of which is (mutally known to be) large enough for the task at hand. Technically, these definite descriptions are not uniquely referring. But these examples are surely only shorthands for close the open door and pass me the largest spanner, and to deny the uniqueness property on the basis of them is’somewhat extreme. What seems to be going on is that some of the information in the semantically explicit versions is allowed to be pragmatically inferred, and once this information is recovered (i.e. once the logical proposition is established on the basis of which truth conditions can be defined), uniqueness holds as before. It must be stressed, however, that all these apparent cases of non-uniqueness are somewhat marginal. A discrepancy between mental representation and reality is only possible when a uniqueness relationship does hold (or has held) in a large number of instances. Witness the ridiculousness of ?Harty bought a book and was dismayed when the page fell out. And if inferred pragmatic information does not supplement the semantics in defining uniqueness, the result will be inappropriateness. Close the door is not appropriate if two doors are open, etc. Shanon (1981) argues that would you pass the salt-shaker please? will be appropriate when uttered at a dinner table on which there are two salt-shakers. Even if this is occasionally true, it is a very marginal example, and I would prefer to see such expressions as short-hands for pass the near salt -shaker. Normally, if S and H have mutual knowledge of e.g. two students, reference to the student will be inappropriate through non-uniqueness (cf. Hawkins (1978) for many more examples of such inappropriateness). In short, I think it would be rash to abandon the uniqueness of definite descriptions on the basis of any of this evidence.
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with a slightly different meaning that need not concern us here. Let us now change the scene slightly. You are being introduced to these very same objects, but this time they are lying around in a garage, after the relevant car has been broken down for scrap. Arriving on the scene, you notice one of these bits lying on the floor, and since it rather intrigues you, you ask the attending mechanic ‘What’s that?’ pointing to the object. He in turn picks it up, and waving said object in the breeze, he says ‘Oh, that’s a clutch’. But he could not, in this situation, say ‘That’s the clutch’. Only if the clutch is actually in the car, together with all the other car’s parts, is the definite article possible. But with dismembered parts, taken out of their part-whole context, definite reference is impossible [2]. The presence or absence of the definite article in these examples does not reflect any prior familiarity on the hearer’s part with this particular clutch, or with clutches in general. This can be seen by changing the examples to parts of a less familiar object, such as a space rocket. Within a space rocket you can be told that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid, but when that very same object is held up in isolation in a scrap yard, and the question is asked ‘What’s that?‘, the answer has to be ‘That’s a goosh-injecting tyroid’. Evidently, what determines the possible use of the definite article is precisely the existence of the larger whole or frame, within which the definite referents can be added as lower level terminals. When one is in the car or space rocket, the assignment of the definite referent to the frame can be made. One reasons that every space rocket evidently has a goosh-injecting tyroid. But when the same objects are presented outside their regarly containing wholes or contexts, there is no frame to attach them to. (Notice that that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid uttered within a car that just happens to have one lying on the back seat is equally inappropriate.) Thus, the referents are clearly identifiable, physically co-present, etc., in these examples, and yet this is not enough. What determines whether the definite article can be used is whether the object in question occurs within a context or frame in which it is a regularly occurring member. It is interesting to examine the book which contains more definite articles than any other: the Duden Bildwiirterbuch or picture-dictionary. Every picture depicts a very detailed scene or ‘whole’ (an office, a car engine, a computer, a space rocket, etc.) containing regularly occurring parts each of which is numbered, and every part named is preceded by the definite article (the battery, the cooling system, the carburator, etc., for a car engine). For most
[2] Notice the following apparent counter-example to this restriction on the use of the. If previous conversation between S and H has mentioned a car, then that’s the clutch will be an appropriate first-mention definite description. But this actually supports my point, because the relevant ‘car set’ or frame has now been invoked linguistically rather than physically. Thus, if the definite article is to be appropriate, the ‘car set’ must be co-present with S and H, in addition to the clutch itself.
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readers, many of the parts of most of these scenes will be quite unknown prior to reading. Now, the reader can, if he wishes, identify each of the relevant parts by matching the definite description with the appropriate numbered item in the picture. But it is clear that the definite article is not used with the necessary expectation that the reader will identify every object in this way - the definite article signals merely that the relevant object is a member of the relevant scene, and the reader can rest content with simply reading the list of parts for each scene, actual identification being optional. Conversely, if we were to reorganize the Bildw6rterbuch by taking each object out of its respective scene and presenting it in alphabetical order along with its individual picture, then the definite article would no longer be usable, just as it is not usable in the that’s a clutch and that’s a goosh-injecting tyroid examples above, despite the identifiability and physical co-presence of the referents. The point about beware of the lion/you’ve severed the ulnar nerve on the one hand, and that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid on the other, is that they show recognition of the appropriate uniqueness set to be necessary and sufficient for appropriateness, whereas identifiability of the referent (in any sense of the term) is neither necessary nor sufficient. But notice that these examples are merely the (rather revealing) tip of a whole iceberg. All uses of the definite article require recognition of the relevant uniqueness parameters. An appropriate anaphoric reference to the linguist requires speaker A to activate the previous discourse set that he shares with hearer B, and to scan all its members sufficiently in order to check that there is no other object of which linguist holds. A ‘visible situation’ reference to the bucket similarly involves scanning the whole situation of utterance. These referents do involve identifiability, and typically a lot more is mutually known about them than is contained in the referring predicate itself (linguist, bucket, etc.). But they also involve scanning the pragmatic set per se, relative to which uniqueness holds. With more indirect co-presence, uniqueness again requires recognition of the appropriate pragmatic set, but this time any additional mutual knowledge can be completely idiosyncratic. When told that the bridesmaids at some wedding looked an awful sight, the hearer might know nothing more about these individuals than that they were instantiations of the typical bridesmaids slot at a wedding, or he might vaguely remember or even know for sure that they were the bride’s two sisters, or both the speaker and the hearer might know them personally, or the hearer might know them and not the speaker, and so on. The possibilities are endless, but what is required again is recognition of the appropriate pragmatic set or ‘wedding frame’. And in the most extreme cases, as we have seen, finding the pragmatic set or frame is all that the hearer can do, and everything else he must take on trust from the speaker. But in pragmatics, as in other areas of linguistics, we must look for linguistically significant generalizations. What unites all these examples is recognition of the relevant pragmatic set, within which the hearer understands
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that the referent is a (unique) member. What else is mutually known may vary with the type of set, and with individual circumstances. But these are irrelevant to the most general statement of the appropriateness conditions for the, and they follow from quite independent principles having to do with the type of pragmatic set, who is talking to whom, etc. The type of linguistic analysis of definite reference I prefer therefore runs like this. The logical (or semantic) description of definiteness makes reference to existence and uniqueness in the usual way. This must then be supplemented by pragmatic conditions governing appropriate usage. But all that these latter need say is that the hearer recognizes the intended pragmatic set within which existence and uniqueness hold. Nothing else is ‘in’ the language, and if any additional mutual knowledge about the referent is required for appropriateness, this will be a simple, and linguistically irrelevant, consequence of the type of pragmatic set involved (previous discourse, ‘wedding set’, etc.) Finally, it is worth asking why the definite article should have this pragmatic set recognition condition built into it as part of its meaning. For the same sets and mutual knowledge can be activated with indefinite references as well. The most natural interpretation of (3) is one in which the window is a part of the house: (3) I went to inspect
a house. I noticed
that a window was broken.
But this interpretation can be removed by changing in other ways as well, cf. Hawkins (1978, ch. 4)): (4) I sold a house to one friend and bought
the context,
as in (4) (and
a window off another.
But the definite article does not have this optionality - there must always be a pragmatic set within which existence and uniqueness hold. Why? The logician’s answer is straightforward: if existence and uniqueness are part of the semantics of the, then whenever you use the you had better find a context within which existence and uniqueness hold. Descriptively this is probably true, but it does not answer the question: Why does our language have a morpheme requiring existence and uniqueness to begin with? We can answer both questions (why the pragmatic sets, and why logical existence and uniqueness) with one rather simple consideration, of a functional kind. The existence of these sets helps the hearer to understand which referent the speaker intends, from among the infinite number of possible referents which satisfy the referring predicate. The speaker is in effect telling the hearer ‘the object that I am referring to is not just any old member of the class of presidents, buckets, etc. - use the mutual knowledge that you and I share to work out who or what I have in mind’. Thus, the hearer assigns the referent of the president to the country that he and the speaker share (the USA), rather
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than to some other country (e.g. Pakistan). And the hearer knows which president the speaker means by making this assignment. Similarly, in the sequence a book: the author, the hearer recognizes that the intended author is the author of the previously mentioned book, rather than just any author. In both examples, the hearer understands which referent the speaker intends by finding the set of which it is a member, and the set thereby defines the existence and identity of the referent. (This point holds even for anaphoric uses _ recall the example about the professor above, which may have a distinct referent in the A & B and A & C previous discourse sets.) But imagine now that the meaning of definiteness was merely such as to require the hearer to find a pragmatic set in which the referent existed, with uniqueness being optional. It would then be possible to have first-mention uses of the such as the senator has committed suicide (when America has several), or second-mention uses such as the linguist (when speaker and hearer have talked of several), etc. But I have argued that the function of the in English is to tell the hearer that he or she has the means to discover which object is being talked about, by first systematically narrowing down the domain of objects relative to which the definite description is interpreted. But if uniqueness does not then supplement the meaning of the, this function cannot be performed, since the reference will still be regularly ambiguous. The hearer still does not know which of the potential referents so delimited (e.g. which of America’s senators) is the actual one. And having pragmatic delimitation without logical uniqueness would be as pointless and as tantalizing as taking your child to the toyshop every day, without ever buying him or her a present.
References Clark, H.H., C.R. Marshall, 1981. ‘Definite reference and mutual knowledge’. In: A.K. Joshi, B.L. Webber, I.A. Sag, eds., Elements of discourse understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 10-64. Dresher, B., N. Hornstein, 1976. On some supposed contributions of artificial intelligence to the scientific study of language. Cognition 4: 321-398. Hawkins, J.A., 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Lyons, C., 1980. ‘The meaning of the English definite article’. In: J. van der Auwera, ed., The semantics of determiners. London: Croom Helm, and Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. pp. 81-95. McCawley, J.D., 1979. ‘Presupposition and discourse context’. In: C.K. Oh, ed., Presupposition; Syntax and semantics, Vol. 11. New York: Academic Press. pp. 371-388. Minsky, M., 1975. ‘A framework for representing knowledge’. In: P. Winston, ed., The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 211-277. Russell, B., 1905. On denoting. Mind 14: 479-493. Shanon, B., 1981. What is in the frame? - Linguistic indicators. Journal of Pragmatics 5: 35-44.
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John Hawkins (b. 1947) received his B.A. in Germanic Philology and Linguistics in 1970 from Cambridge University, and his Ph. D. in Linguistics in 1975 also from Cambridge. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics, USC, and a senior research associate at the Max-Planck-Institut fir Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, having held previous appointments at Essex University (lecturer 1973-1976) and at UCLA (visiting assistant professor 197661977). He has published articles and books on definite and indefinite reference, word order universals, historical linguistics and comparative Germanic syntax. Some publications relevant to the present paper are: ‘On explaining some ungrammatical sequences of article+ modifier in English’. In: S.S. Mufwene, C.A. Walker and S.S. Steever, eds., Papers from the 12th regional meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society: Chicago. pp. 287-301 (1976); Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1978); ‘On surface definite articles in English: Proving underlying indefiniteness and explaining the conversion to definiteness’. In: J. van der Auwera, ed., The semantics of determiners. London: Croom Helm, and Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. pp. 41-66 (1980).
Journal of Pragmatics 8 (1984) 649-659 North-Holland
A NOTE ON REFERENT
John A. HAWKINS
IDENTIFIABILITY
AND CO-PRESENCE
*
It is often suggested (most recently by Clark and Marshall (1981)) that there are restrictive conditions on the appropriate use of definite descriptions, involving ‘referent identifiability’ or ‘co-presence of the speaker, the hearer and the object referred to’. The purpose of this note is to argue that such conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient and miss a significant pragmatic generalization about appropriateness. A more abstract alternative is summarized in which the universe of discourse is structured into sets of objects defined pragmatically as well as logically. These pragmatic sets fix the boundaries relative to which the uniqueness of singular definite descriptions holds, and speakers exploit these sets when making their references unique and unambiguous for the hearer. Some examples are discussed which suggest that the recognition by the hearer of the intended pragmatic uniqueness set is a crucial part of what is claimed to be ‘identifiable’, whether or not the referent itself is simultaneously ‘identifiable’ or ‘co-present’. The more restrictive conditions that appear to hold are automatic consequences of real-world differences between the pragmatic sets involved, and to include them within an account of the pragmatic meaning of definiteness as such is to put too much real world knowledge and inference into the language.
It is generally assumed in the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature that the appropriate use of a definite description requires some form of ‘identifiability’ by the hearer of the object referred to. Defining what it means for something to be ‘identifiable’ is, however, no easy matter. Demonstrative expressions with this and that are more restrictive in their identifiability requirements than definite expressions with the. And these in turn reveal an almost baffling array of usage possibilities, from the strongly deictic at one end (pass me the bucket) to the idiomatic and almost indefinite at the other (I was on the train yesterday). As a result, an adequate definition of identifiability covering every single use of a definite description is probably doomed from the start. Nonetheless, the majority of uses do have very clear conditions of appropriateness involving some form of identifiability, and it is therefore important to try and define this term for the clear cases at least. Clark and Marshall (1981) have * Author’s address: John A. Hawkins, Max-Planck-Institut fur Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693, USA. 037%2166/84/$3.00
0 1984, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
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recently offered a definition in terms of different types of ‘co-presence of the speaker, the hearer and the object referred to’. The purpose of this note is to point out that Clark and Marshall’s characterization, like many others before it, seems to be too restrictive and misses a significant generalization about what it is that the speaker assumes to be identifiable to the hearer when using a definite description. Some examples are discussed which are exceptions to the co-presence conditions, and a more abstract generalization is proposed which subsumes both the exceptions and the more straightforward cases. Undoubtedly the fundamental insight about the meaning of singular definite descriptions is that the object described by e.g. the king of Frunce is unique (cf. Russell (1905)). As fundamental as this insight is, however, it prompts the question: ‘Unique in what sense’? For a speaker can refer using the king or the president, even though there are currently many kings and even more presidents that he knows of, knows that his hearer knows of, etc. And all but one of these potential kings or presidents is excluded from the reference on each occasion of use, and the speaker is understood to be referring to e.g. the Ring of France, or the President of the United States. But what are, in general, the parameters relative to which singular definite NPs refer uniquely? And how are these parameters invoked in actual language use, in order to achieve unambiguous definite descriptions? How, in short, is the universe of discourse structured? Within model-theoretic semantics, the universe of discourse enumerates the objects in terms of which the logical language is to be interpreted. Such objects are thereby ‘classified’ on the basis of the predicates that are true of them. For example, a one-place predicate (such as president) defines a set of individuals, those having the relevant property, a two-place predicate (e.g. see) defines a set of ordered pairs of objects, etc. Hawkins (1978) argues that a more realistic universe of discourse should be divided into sets on pragmatic grounds as well (cf. also McCawley (1979) for a similar proposal). The logical predicates will define further sets and groupings within these pragmatic sets, but it is the pragmatic sets which actually define the parameters relative to which the uniqueness of definite descriptions holds. Among the officiaries of the United States there is only one president, for example, though in the world at large there are several. What kinds of pragmatic sets are there? Numerous examples were given in Hawkins (1978) (the term used there is ‘shared sets’), and Clark and Marshall (1981) draw extensively on these in developing their co-presence theory. But whereas Hawkins’ theory attached crucial importance to the existence of such pragmatic sets within the universe of discourse, arguing that an overall definition of identifiability must make reference to them (cf. the term ‘location’ of the referent within a shared set), Clark and Marshall in effect revert to the more traditional view that it is the objects themselves that have to be identifiable or co-present. And Hawkins’ different pragmatic sets are used only
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to illustrate different types of referent identifiability or co-presence, and so play a quite secondary role. Yet there are many examples of definite descriptions which do not lend themselves to this reduction. At the risk of repetition I would like to return to some of them in the present context. The matter is of some importance since it raises the general question of what we mean by ‘identifiability’, and different conclusions have evidently been drawn from a similar body of data. Hawkins (1978) argued, for example, that the visible situation of utterance constitutes one of the pragmatic sets relative to which uniqueness may be interpreted: pass me the bucket will be ambiguous for the hearer if there is more than one bucket in the field of vision. Clark and Marshall talk here of the ‘physical co-presence’ of the speaker (S), the hearer (H), and the object referred to (within the immediate, potential or prior field of vision). It was also argued that the objects talked about between a given speaker and hearer will constitute a pragmatic set relative to which uniqueness can be interpreted: previous reference to a bucket permits subsequent reference to the bucket - if more than one bucket has been talked about, the bucket will be ambiguous through non-uniqueness. Clark and Marshall talk here of the ‘linguistic co-presence of S, H and R ‘. These are the classic examples of anaphoric or ‘second-mention’ the. More frequent than either of these two cases are definite descriptions whose parameters of uniqueness are defined on the basis of a more general type of mutual knowledge, such as the fact that the set of officiaries of America contains a (unique) president, etc, which sanctions a first-mention use of the President. Similarly, after referring to a wedding, the speaker can immediately talk of the bride, and also of the bridesmaids and the cake, because all members of the relevant linguistic community know that the set of things which make up a wedding typically includes these. And when one goes to a wedding one can ask Z wonder who the bridesmaids are? even if they are not yet physically present. In Clark and Marshall’s terms, mutual knowledge of the referent is no longer direct in these examples, since the referent is neither visible nor previously mentioned, but derives from S’s and H’s ‘co-membership’ in various communities, all members of which share certain types of information. The referents of the bride, the bridesmaids, the president, etc, are therefore ‘indirectly co-present’ with S and H, as a result of this more general mutual knowledge. In Hawkins (1978) the use of the definite article was argued to be theoretically revealing since it gives direct insight into the structuring of the objects of the universe to which speakers and hearers ‘appeal’ when making their definite references unique and unambiguous. The visible situation uses are the least interesting in this regard, because the structuring is imposed by the physical situation itself, and whatever objects it happens to contain. Anaphoric uses are more interesting, since every speaker typically keeps a record of the objects
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that he has talked about with each hearer, together with the properties that hold of each. If speaker A has talked to hearer B about some professor, and to hearer C about a different professor, reference to the professor will be perfectly successful in an A and B dialogue and in an A and C dialogue, since uniqueness holds within each of the previous discourse sets, even though A knows more than one professor. And if both professors are linguists, and A and B share previous discourse knowledge of only one such, whereas A and C share previous discourse knowledge of two linguists, the linguist will be a successful reference from A to B, but not from A to C (cf. Hawkins (1978: 108-110)). But it is the definite descriptions based on more general, community-derived knowledge that are the most interesting of all. The structuring that underlies such sequences as a wedding: the bride (or a house: the roof; a ship: the captain; a book: the author, etc.) looks at first like nothing more than a reflection of some kind of whole-part relationship between objects, which could be just as easily determined by examining the objects themselves, rather than uses of the definite article. But this impression is oversimple. The definite descriptions are first of all highly hearer-sensitive: for example, a linguist does not meet a historian at a party and use a grammar: the deep structure sequences, invoking the latter on the basis of the former. The structurings that a speaker invokes for each hearer will generally be a proper subset of those that he alone possesses knowledge of. These structurings can also be at variance with reality: Z inspected a house, but didn’t like the door is perfectly appropriate, even though houses invariably have more than one door. And finally, there is no simple condition, such as the whole-part relationship, which underlies these structurings. Sequences like a car: the steering wheel are plausibly analyzable as whole and part, but a car: the weight is not, since weight is an attribute and not a part. Nor is high frequency of co-occurrence a necessary guarantee of co-existence in a common set. Clark and Marshall (1981: 41) point out that a candle has only a likelihood of having a wrapper associated with it, and only a low possibility of being made of bayberries, and yet Z bought a candle yesterday, but the wrapper was torn and Z bought a candle yesterday, and the bayberry smelled great may both succeed. On the other hand, in the following example prior reference to a car sanctions immediate reference to the exhaust fumes but not to the dog, even though dogs are quite often seen in cars, and the car in question was clearly one that did have a dog in it: (1) The man drove past our house in a car. The exhaust fumes were terrible. (2) The man drove past our house in a car. ?The dog was barking furiously. These examples all suggest that the mental representations of the world that humans derive from their experience of reality reflects complex organizing principles based on numerous criteria (logical, functional, quantitative), which
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aggregate over many instances. representations and aggregations
and co-presence
Minsky (1975) has discussed such in terms of the notion of a ‘frame’:
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mental
Here is the essence of the theory: When one encounters a new situation one selects from memory a substantial structure called a frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary. A frame is a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation. like being in a certain kind of living room, or going to a child’s birthday party. Attached to each frame are several kinds of information . We can think of a frame as a network of nodes and relations. The ‘top levels’ of a frame are fixed, and represent things that are always true about the supposed situation. The lower levels have many terminals - ‘slots’ that must be filled by specific instances of data. Each terminal can specify conditions its assignment must meet. (Minsky 1975: 212)
Minsky’s discussion is very suggestive, even though (as Dresher and Hornstein (1976) point out) he applies his frame idea far too broadly. Nonetheless, it helps us to understand the appropriateness difference between (1) and (2). The sequence of (2) is inappropriate, not because the hearer is reluctant to believe that the car in question did contain a (unique) dog, but because the ‘car frame’ of S’s and H’s general community knowledge does not contain one. The frame idea also helps us to clarify the identifiability issue. Hawkins (1978) argued that definite descriptions need not be identifiable to the hearer in the same way that demonstrative expressions are, because of such contrasts as don’t go in there (said to someone walking up a neighbour’s drive) that dog will bite versus the dog will bite. Visibility or audibility of the dog is required for the former, but not for the latter, which merely informs the hearer that there is a dog in the relevant vicinity. Clark and Marshall (1981: 45) acknowledge this distinction, but they argue that the definite referent must still be at least indirectly identifiable or co-present, on the basis of mutual knowledge that e.g. a house may often contain a dog. However, even the weakest definition of identifiability or co-presence can be shown to be neither a necesssary nor a sufficient condition for the appropriate use of the. But what is both necessary and sufficient, I will suggest, is recognition of the appropriate uniqueness set or frame. That identifiability of the referent is not necessary can be seen in examples where the hearer can ‘locate’ the referent in the appropriate set, even though he knows absolutely nothing about the relevant object, and has not the slightest expectation that such an object could be a member of such a set. Consider a notice such as beware of the lion attached to a house gate. However unexpected this might be, it is still a perfectly appropriate definite description. Beware of the dog is more normal, by contrast, and may be said to activate certain mutual expectations. Yet the two examples are understood in the same way - there is a dog/lion existing within a context that the hearer can readily infer (the house), and he should beware of it. Or consider an actually attested example from a conversation with a doctor just after a serious injury to my right arm: you’ue severed the ulnar nerve. I did not have the faintest idea what an ulnar nerve
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was, but I was able to infer that it was a (unique) part of my right arm. In Minsky’s terminology, I as hearer could be said to be adding a new lower level terminal to my ‘arm frame’! Such examples are not infrequent. The hearer must be able to know where the referent exists, and what it is unique to, or else the definite description will be inappropriate [l]. But over and above that, any additional mutual knowledge or mutual expectations about the referent may not be required. Conversely, identifiability is not a sufficient condition for the use of the. The best example I have here involves certain NPs in predicate nominal position. Imagine the following scene. You are having your first driving lesson, and the instructor is pointing out the various parts of a car to you using locutions like that’s the gear lever, that’s the clutch, that’s the ignition key, etc. He could also use the indefinite article on these occasions, that’s a gear lever, There are some apparent counter-examples to the claim that uniqueness within a pragmatic set is a prerequisite for appropriateness. We have already considered one type of example in which the speaker’s and hearer’s mental representation of objects, reflected in their linguistic utterances, is at variance with reality: I inspected a house, but didn’t like the door. Houses invariably have more than
[l]
one door these days. More typical of this type of discrepancy are examples where the predictably occurring ‘part’ within a ‘whole’ is very often unique, but by no means invariably so: Arriuing in an unknown town, I looked for the bookshop, or: Harry bought a book and was rmpressed by the author. Towns may have more than one bookshop (depending on their size), and books are increasingly multi-authored. But the conception of reality that native speakers adopt and which they reveal in their language use is one which aggregates over such diversity in favour of a uniqueness relationship. Uniqueness does still obtain in these examples, therefore, within the mental structuring of the universe that speakers and hearers have mutual knowledge of. A second class of counter-examples is discussed by Lyons (1980). Lyons points out that close the door can be appropriately uttered when the room in question contains three doors, only one of which is open. And pass me the spanner can be appropriate when three spanners are lying around, only one of which is (mutally known to be) large enough for the task at hand. Technically, these definite descriptions are not uniquely referring. But these examples are surely only shorthands for close the open door and pass me the largest spanner, and to deny the uniqueness property on the basis of them is’somewhat extreme. What seems to be going on is that some of the information in the semantically explicit versions is allowed to be pragmatically inferred, and once this information is recovered (i.e. once the logical proposition is established on the basis of which truth conditions can be defined), uniqueness holds as before. It must be stressed, however, that all these apparent cases of non-uniqueness are somewhat marginal. A discrepancy between mental representation and reality is only possible when a uniqueness relationship does hold (or has held) in a large number of instances. Witness the ridiculousness of ?Harty bought a book and was dismayed when the page fell out. And if inferred pragmatic information does not supplement the semantics in defining uniqueness, the result will be inappropriateness. Close the door is not appropriate if two doors are open, etc. Shanon (1981) argues that would you pass the salt-shaker please? will be appropriate when uttered at a dinner table on which there are two salt-shakers. Even if this is occasionally true, it is a very marginal example, and I would prefer to see such expressions as short-hands for pass the near salt -shaker. Normally, if S and H have mutual knowledge of e.g. two students, reference to the student will be inappropriate through non-uniqueness (cf. Hawkins (1978) for many more examples of such inappropriateness). In short, I think it would be rash to abandon the uniqueness of definite descriptions on the basis of any of this evidence.
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with a slightly different meaning that need not concern us here. Let us now change the scene slightly. You are being introduced to these very same objects, but this time they are lying around in a garage, after the relevant car has been broken down for scrap. Arriving on the scene, you notice one of these bits lying on the floor, and since it rather intrigues you, you ask the attending mechanic ‘What’s that?’ pointing to the object. He in turn picks it up, and waving said object in the breeze, he says ‘Oh, that’s a clutch’. But he could not, in this situation, say ‘That’s the clutch’. Only if the clutch is actually in the car, together with all the other car’s parts, is the definite article possible. But with dismembered parts, taken out of their part-whole context, definite reference is impossible [2]. The presence or absence of the definite article in these examples does not reflect any prior familiarity on the hearer’s part with this particular clutch, or with clutches in general. This can be seen by changing the examples to parts of a less familiar object, such as a space rocket. Within a space rocket you can be told that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid, but when that very same object is held up in isolation in a scrap yard, and the question is asked ‘What’s that?‘, the answer has to be ‘That’s a goosh-injecting tyroid’. Evidently, what determines the possible use of the definite article is precisely the existence of the larger whole or frame, within which the definite referents can be added as lower level terminals. When one is in the car or space rocket, the assignment of the definite referent to the frame can be made. One reasons that every space rocket evidently has a goosh-injecting tyroid. But when the same objects are presented outside their regarly containing wholes or contexts, there is no frame to attach them to. (Notice that that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid uttered within a car that just happens to have one lying on the back seat is equally inappropriate.) Thus, the referents are clearly identifiable, physically co-present, etc., in these examples, and yet this is not enough. What determines whether the definite article can be used is whether the object in question occurs within a context or frame in which it is a regularly occurring member. It is interesting to examine the book which contains more definite articles than any other: the Duden Bildwiirterbuch or picture-dictionary. Every picture depicts a very detailed scene or ‘whole’ (an office, a car engine, a computer, a space rocket, etc.) containing regularly occurring parts each of which is numbered, and every part named is preceded by the definite article (the battery, the cooling system, the carburator, etc., for a car engine). For most
[2] Notice the following apparent counter-example to this restriction on the use of the. If previous conversation between S and H has mentioned a car, then that’s the clutch will be an appropriate first-mention definite description. But this actually supports my point, because the relevant ‘car set’ or frame has now been invoked linguistically rather than physically. Thus, if the definite article is to be appropriate, the ‘car set’ must be co-present with S and H, in addition to the clutch itself.
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readers, many of the parts of most of these scenes will be quite unknown prior to reading. Now, the reader can, if he wishes, identify each of the relevant parts by matching the definite description with the appropriate numbered item in the picture. But it is clear that the definite article is not used with the necessary expectation that the reader will identify every object in this way - the definite article signals merely that the relevant object is a member of the relevant scene, and the reader can rest content with simply reading the list of parts for each scene, actual identification being optional. Conversely, if we were to reorganize the Bildw6rterbuch by taking each object out of its respective scene and presenting it in alphabetical order along with its individual picture, then the definite article would no longer be usable, just as it is not usable in the that’s a clutch and that’s a goosh-injecting tyroid examples above, despite the identifiability and physical co-presence of the referents. The point about beware of the lion/you’ve severed the ulnar nerve on the one hand, and that’s the goosh-injecting tyroid on the other, is that they show recognition of the appropriate uniqueness set to be necessary and sufficient for appropriateness, whereas identifiability of the referent (in any sense of the term) is neither necessary nor sufficient. But notice that these examples are merely the (rather revealing) tip of a whole iceberg. All uses of the definite article require recognition of the relevant uniqueness parameters. An appropriate anaphoric reference to the linguist requires speaker A to activate the previous discourse set that he shares with hearer B, and to scan all its members sufficiently in order to check that there is no other object of which linguist holds. A ‘visible situation’ reference to the bucket similarly involves scanning the whole situation of utterance. These referents do involve identifiability, and typically a lot more is mutually known about them than is contained in the referring predicate itself (linguist, bucket, etc.). But they also involve scanning the pragmatic set per se, relative to which uniqueness holds. With more indirect co-presence, uniqueness again requires recognition of the appropriate pragmatic set, but this time any additional mutual knowledge can be completely idiosyncratic. When told that the bridesmaids at some wedding looked an awful sight, the hearer might know nothing more about these individuals than that they were instantiations of the typical bridesmaids slot at a wedding, or he might vaguely remember or even know for sure that they were the bride’s two sisters, or both the speaker and the hearer might know them personally, or the hearer might know them and not the speaker, and so on. The possibilities are endless, but what is required again is recognition of the appropriate pragmatic set or ‘wedding frame’. And in the most extreme cases, as we have seen, finding the pragmatic set or frame is all that the hearer can do, and everything else he must take on trust from the speaker. But in pragmatics, as in other areas of linguistics, we must look for linguistically significant generalizations. What unites all these examples is recognition of the relevant pragmatic set, within which the hearer understands
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that the referent is a (unique) member. What else is mutually known may vary with the type of set, and with individual circumstances. But these are irrelevant to the most general statement of the appropriateness conditions for the, and they follow from quite independent principles having to do with the type of pragmatic set, who is talking to whom, etc. The type of linguistic analysis of definite reference I prefer therefore runs like this. The logical (or semantic) description of definiteness makes reference to existence and uniqueness in the usual way. This must then be supplemented by pragmatic conditions governing appropriate usage. But all that these latter need say is that the hearer recognizes the intended pragmatic set within which existence and uniqueness hold. Nothing else is ‘in’ the language, and if any additional mutual knowledge about the referent is required for appropriateness, this will be a simple, and linguistically irrelevant, consequence of the type of pragmatic set involved (previous discourse, ‘wedding set’, etc.) Finally, it is worth asking why the definite article should have this pragmatic set recognition condition built into it as part of its meaning. For the same sets and mutual knowledge can be activated with indefinite references as well. The most natural interpretation of (3) is one in which the window is a part of the house: (3) I went to inspect
a house. I noticed
that a window was broken.
But this interpretation can be removed by changing in other ways as well, cf. Hawkins (1978, ch. 4)): (4) I sold a house to one friend and bought
the context,
as in (4) (and
a window off another.
But the definite article does not have this optionality - there must always be a pragmatic set within which existence and uniqueness hold. Why? The logician’s answer is straightforward: if existence and uniqueness are part of the semantics of the, then whenever you use the you had better find a context within which existence and uniqueness hold. Descriptively this is probably true, but it does not answer the question: Why does our language have a morpheme requiring existence and uniqueness to begin with? We can answer both questions (why the pragmatic sets, and why logical existence and uniqueness) with one rather simple consideration, of a functional kind. The existence of these sets helps the hearer to understand which referent the speaker intends, from among the infinite number of possible referents which satisfy the referring predicate. The speaker is in effect telling the hearer ‘the object that I am referring to is not just any old member of the class of presidents, buckets, etc. - use the mutual knowledge that you and I share to work out who or what I have in mind’. Thus, the hearer assigns the referent of the president to the country that he and the speaker share (the USA), rather
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than to some other country (e.g. Pakistan). And the hearer knows which president the speaker means by making this assignment. Similarly, in the sequence a book: the author, the hearer recognizes that the intended author is the author of the previously mentioned book, rather than just any author. In both examples, the hearer understands which referent the speaker intends by finding the set of which it is a member, and the set thereby defines the existence and identity of the referent. (This point holds even for anaphoric uses _ recall the example about the professor above, which may have a distinct referent in the A & B and A & C previous discourse sets.) But imagine now that the meaning of definiteness was merely such as to require the hearer to find a pragmatic set in which the referent existed, with uniqueness being optional. It would then be possible to have first-mention uses of the such as the senator has committed suicide (when America has several), or second-mention uses such as the linguist (when speaker and hearer have talked of several), etc. But I have argued that the function of the in English is to tell the hearer that he or she has the means to discover which object is being talked about, by first systematically narrowing down the domain of objects relative to which the definite description is interpreted. But if uniqueness does not then supplement the meaning of the, this function cannot be performed, since the reference will still be regularly ambiguous. The hearer still does not know which of the potential referents so delimited (e.g. which of America’s senators) is the actual one. And having pragmatic delimitation without logical uniqueness would be as pointless and as tantalizing as taking your child to the toyshop every day, without ever buying him or her a present.
References Clark, H.H., C.R. Marshall, 1981. ‘Definite reference and mutual knowledge’. In: A.K. Joshi, B.L. Webber, I.A. Sag, eds., Elements of discourse understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 10-64. Dresher, B., N. Hornstein, 1976. On some supposed contributions of artificial intelligence to the scientific study of language. Cognition 4: 321-398. Hawkins, J.A., 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Lyons, C., 1980. ‘The meaning of the English definite article’. In: J. van der Auwera, ed., The semantics of determiners. London: Croom Helm, and Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. pp. 81-95. McCawley, J.D., 1979. ‘Presupposition and discourse context’. In: C.K. Oh, ed., Presupposition; Syntax and semantics, Vol. 11. New York: Academic Press. pp. 371-388. Minsky, M., 1975. ‘A framework for representing knowledge’. In: P. Winston, ed., The psychology of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill. pp. 211-277. Russell, B., 1905. On denoting. Mind 14: 479-493. Shanon, B., 1981. What is in the frame? - Linguistic indicators. Journal of Pragmatics 5: 35-44.
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John Hawkins (b. 1947) received his B.A. in Germanic Philology and Linguistics in 1970 from Cambridge University, and his Ph. D. in Linguistics in 1975 also from Cambridge. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics, USC, and a senior research associate at the Max-Planck-Institut fir Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, having held previous appointments at Essex University (lecturer 1973-1976) and at UCLA (visiting assistant professor 197661977). He has published articles and books on definite and indefinite reference, word order universals, historical linguistics and comparative Germanic syntax. Some publications relevant to the present paper are: ‘On explaining some ungrammatical sequences of article+ modifier in English’. In: S.S. Mufwene, C.A. Walker and S.S. Steever, eds., Papers from the 12th regional meeting. Chicago Linguistic Society: Chicago. pp. 287-301 (1976); Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom Helm, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1978); ‘On surface definite articles in English: Proving underlying indefiniteness and explaining the conversion to definiteness’. In: J. van der Auwera, ed., The semantics of determiners. London: Croom Helm, and Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. pp. 41-66 (1980).