copy of Linguist List article and reply

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>]

A message on Linguist List, and the response I am posting to it.

1)
Date:         Fri, 06 Mar 92 22:58:58 EST
From: Michael Newman <MNEHC@CUNYVM.bitnet>
Subject:      specificity problems

In doing work on my dissertation on pronominal usage in a corpus I am
en- countering a semantic conundrum which my training in semantics is
not adequate to solve.  The problem is related to the semantic
distinction between referents which are +specific (or +referential) or
more informally real, existing out there in some way, and those which
are -specific, hypothetical or generic.  Thus there is a clear
distinction between two readings of , to use a rather unoriginal
example.  "Peter is going to marry the richest woman in town."  So far
so good.  The issue seems relatively clear when you are using example
sen- tences, but when you use real language, things do get messy
sometimes.  For ex- ample, I would be reluctant to use the + or -
specific lable for the following example from my corpus, (which is based
on TV talk shows by the way) The prob- lematic antecedent-anaphor pair
are in caps:

   (1) I have become involved with a consumer advocacy group called
   s.h.a.m.e. it stands for Stop[ Hospital and Medical Errors, and it is a
   group that was formed by MALPRACTICE VICTIMS and THEIR families.

In this case there were indeed a concrete set of people who formed this
group, yet neither speaker nor hearer were in any position to specify
that set any further.  In addition it is certainly conceivible that
there might be some dis- pute as to who exactly belongs in this set or
not.  So my solution was to label this type as semi-specific (actually I
use the term 'semi-solid' reserving 'solid' for specific and non-solid
for -specific, but I don't want to get into that here) Cases like (1)
where there are sets which none of the interlocutors are in any position
to identify are fairly common, and using this semi label, I have managed
to reduce the number of problematic tokens by more than half.  If any
semanticists have any objections to this, I would like to hear them now,
before I get any further.

Yet I have not solved all my problems.  Here are a few cases which I am
puzzling over.  In (2) the speaker (George Carlin on Larry King Live by
the way) is talk- ing about censorship on the radio

   (2) you know THESE MORAL COMMANDOS who want us to think THEIR way and
   want to change what we can hear and see and think in this country are
   dangerous.  . .

This is close to a generic, but is it a true generic?  The use of the
definite specifier would seem to tilt the image in the direction of a
closed set of people.

(3) is also from George Carlin who is talking about Andrew Dice Clay and
his fans.  Clay is (or was since he disappeared from view) a comedian
who would make hostile jokes about gays, blacks, women, immigrants, etc.

   (3) I think he's appealing largely, I think his core audience are young
   white males who are threatended by these groups.  I think A LOT OF THESE
   GUYS aren't sure of THEIR manhood, because that's a problem when you're
   going through adolesence, you know, am I really, am I?

This ambiguity or perhaps more acurately, vagueness, of specificity of
refer- ence seems typical of Carlin and some other speakers.  It will be
part of the findings of my dissertation, but I would like it if someone
with more semantic training than myself would help me draw the lines on
what appears to be a cline from one extreme, the concrete individual(s)
whose identities are known, to the other, hypothetical or generic
referents.  Michael Newman
---------------------------------------

Michael Newman <MNEHC@CUNYVM.bitnet>:
Re your posting on specificity.  I'm not sure whether it helps, but all
of your example sentences get translated into Lojban using a 'feature'
orthogonal to the +/-specificity one, that does not apply to the "the
richest woman in town" example.  That is the question of massification.

Each of your numbered examples are expressed in Lojban using "mass
nouns" since Lojban can express any 'noun' as a mass noun.  Analogizing
back to an understandable English example you can get the sample
sentence "John spilled [SOME] WATER from ITS basin", where I believe the
optional quantifier "some" may indicate specificity, but need not force
it.  Without the quantifier, the mass noun seems clearly non-specific
(although the "its" clearly points back to the non-specific portion
being described).  Yes, there is some specific water associated with any
given basin, but there is no indication in the sample sentence that a
specific basin is being referred to, hence the water itself is generic.
With the quantifier, the reference could still be non-specific, except
that it is selecting a non-specific "some" portion out of the mass of
water.

Mass nouns can exhibit either generic and specific properties in Lojban.
In English, however, we almost always flag the specific with "the" or a
quantifier like "some" and usually omit it with generic mass nouns.  But
sometimes English treats non-mass nouns as masses, and the kind of
confusion of your sample sentences results.  Sometimes, but not always,
the descriptor is omitted.  In your examples (2) and (3), the word
"these" could be omitted, while it could be added in (1), with no
obvious change in meaning.  (Perhaps it is being included as a kind of
agreement with the later possessive).

>   (2) you know THESE MORAL COMMANDOS who want us to think THEIR way and
>   want to change what we can hear and see and think in this country are
>   dangerous.  . .

Here the "commandos" are being massified.  There are a set of (persons)
possibly describable as "moral commandos".  Consider the whole set as a
mass.  A portion, but not necessarily all of the mass, "want us to think
THEIR way".  There is no statement being made about a portion of "moral
commandos" who might not "want us to think their way".  Such a portion
might or might not exist.  The generic mass is being restricted to the
degree necessary by the restriction of whether specific portions (i.e.
individuals) want us to think their way.

Returning to the water analogy, and repeating:

"John spilled [SOME] WATER from ITS basin"

Here "water" is being massified.  There is a mass substance, described
as "water".  Consider the entirety of water as a mass.  A portion, not
necessarily all of the mass, was "spilled ... from ITS basin".  There is
no statement being made about a [the] portion of "water" that might not
have been spilled, or might not even have been associated with a basin.
The generic mass of water is being restricted to the degree necessary, by
whether specific portions were associated with some basin and spilled
from it by John.

There is no necessity in the water example that the speaker have a
specific basin in mind.  The basin is restricted by association with
some water that spilled from it (and with John who spilled it), and the
water is restricted by association with a basin spilled from (and with
John).

lojbab