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Notes
Chomsky (1965, 100).
Chomsky (1965, 217), offers as an example “I once read a novel by a different John Smith” and comments that they may be derived from proper names by transformation.
Sloat (1969).
Burge (1973).
Burge (1973, 430). Sloat advanced the same line as well, claiming that a proper name, say, “Smith”, has a constant meaning person that we call “Smith”.
Burge (1973, 432).
Burge (1973, 437).
Elbourne (2005, 171).
In Jeshion (2014a), I offered a different version of the uniformity argument. Ultimately, both reveal the same problems with the predicativists’ argument, but the version on offer here is more explicit in spelling out how the predicativist’s argument rests on the appeal to proper names being used literally, or with their normal meaning, while that in Jeshion (2014a) points toward alternative ways of explaining the available data sets. Elugardo (2002) also offers a detailed explication of a version of the uniformity argument. His differs significantly from mine insofar as it does not emphasize predicativists’ claims to having accounted for literal uses and to having exhausted the types of cases requiring explanation. Cf., also Rami (2013) for an account that focuses on Burge’s development of the argument.
Burge (1973, 434).
Examples of this kind were first offered by Boër in his critical piece on Burge, Boër (1975). Boër maintained that predicativists need to explain them with the BNC/BCC, as does Elugardo (2002). I regard these cases as having a different dialectical role. Predicativists need a motivation for treating APEs differently from Family Examples, and indeed from our other types of examples.
Matushansky (2014, 14). Oddly, Fara (2014b, 47) summarizes my point as the claim that the predicativist “cherry-picks” BCC-friendly Examples by discounting Producer, Representational, Resemblance, and Family Examples and that therefore “predicativists cannot claim to genuinely have concerns for uniformity”. This is a nontrivial misunderstanding.
Fara (2014a). Fara actually treats Producer Examples and Representational Examples as instances of deferred interpretation, and regards the Resemblance Examples as a separate class unto themselves. I do not find this additional level of categorization useful, since the Resemblance Examples are rather naturally construed as on a par with the others. Cf., Jeshion (2014b) for further discussion. In any event, I believe that this more complex classification is inessential to her overall perspective so I simplify here and present it my way. Cf., Matushansky (2014) for additional discussion of these types of examples.
Nunberg (2004, 344).
Fara (2014a).
Fara (2014a) advocates the appeal to parallels with common count nouns to establish that the Producer, Representation, and Resemblance examples do not call into question the predicativist semantic analysis of APEs.
Fara (2014a) offers examples similar to [40].
Lewis offered this point in her comments on an ancestor of this paper at the Pacific APA, 2013.
Cf., Kaplan (1990). Cf., Sainsbury [ms] characterizes generic names as serving as templates for common currency names.
Cf., Rami (2014) for several interesting objections to Kaplan’s distinction between common currency and generic names.
The extent to which they are depends upon their respective individuation conditions. Although I have suggested phonological and orthographic properties to individuate names, historical and social properties are also fundamental, and it remains most unclear how to give necessary and sufficient conditions. “Limoncello” is an Italian surname but, evidently, many Italian-Americans belonging to the Limoncello family spell their name “Lemongello”, and pronounce it differently as well. Do the Italians and Italian-Americans have the same surname? If a jello enthusiast with spelling challenges gave herself a new surname in honor of her favorite dessert—“Lemongello”—would it be the same surname as the Italian-Americans? Do Robyn Carston and I have the same first name? I am inclined to think that the answer depends upon the context. In some contexts, perhaps those involving tracing ancestral lines, the historical properties are fundamental. In others, the orthographic properties are fundamental, as in John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines, from which this telling passage is extracted: “When it comes to girls (and in Colin’s case, it so often did), everyone has a type. Colin Singleton’s type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I–N-E.” Green (2006, 15) Thanks to Yael Jeshion-Nelson, John Green lover, for getting me onto this novel.
In Jeshion (2014a), I offered a rough but general rule indicating how to explain the BCC-friendly Examples analogously to Producer, Representation, Resemblance, and Metaphoric Examples, namely by going metalinguistic. Leckie (2013) offers a similar metalinguistic approach to the derivation. However, for reasons given in Sect. 6, I do not adopt her Polysemy View.
One possible problem with the syntactic test, pressed by Barbara Abbott and Karen Lewis, is that certain terms widely recognized to be proper names cannot be used without a determiner in the singular in argument position. Consider [*] Pacific Ocean is to the west of California. Since it is intuitively ungrammatical, by the test, “Pacific Ocean” would not be a proper name. While I take the objection seriously, I am inclined to cordon off this type of example as exceptional – a point of view shared by many that have a neutral stance on this debate. One reason is that “Pacific Ocean” manifests syntactic properties that neither mirror those of ordinary count nouns nor those of ordinary proper names. For example, it does not appear to have all the syntactic properties of common count nouns, a point underscored by the problematic sentence [**] A Pacific Ocean is to the west of California. So there are reasons for regarding “Pacific Ocean” (and other similar examples: the country name, “The Netherlands”, the name of the Munch painting, “The Scream”, etc.) as exceptional. Cf., Segal (2001) for further discussion.
This example and Bias in Sect. 7 are inspired by well-known social psychology experiments that identical resumes with different names receive different evaluations.
Leckie (2013) advocates a Polysemy View according to which all proper names are referential in AREs, yet when they occur as predicates, all are common nouns and all have a lexicalized meaning “person called “N””. While I agree about referentialism, and find her arguments for the lexicalization of the common noun meaning interesting, it cannot be correct as a full theory of proper names (as opposed to a theory of anthroponyms). If “California” has a lexicalized common noun meaning (which I doubt), it is not “person called “California””. Bracketing this difficulty, I am doubtful that “Kristallnacht” has a lexicalized common noun meaning “individual called “Kristallnacht”” that is available (even if weak) in “There were many Kristallnachts in the twentieth century”.
The dependency between deferred interpretation and lexicalized meaning is of course general, which is why certain Producer Examples, like “Picassos” in [84], are difficult to decisively classify as having a lexicalized common noun meaning “produced by Picasso” or as involving a contextually coerced semantic type shift.
Henceforth I shall drop this alternative.
Sloat (1969), Matushansky (2006), and Fara (2014), especially §§8–12, all emphasize the ungrammaticality of [13b]. In previous writings on this topic, I failed to raise any concerns about the ungrammaticality judgment on [13b] and, in fact, only noticed this crucial point in the very last stages of writing this paper. Had I noticed earlier, the paper would have taken a radically different form. Many thanks to an anonymous referee who correctly pressed the importance of [13b] to my argument in Sect. 6, and whose conviction that [13b] is ungrammatical pushed me to question this assumption.
Fara (2014b, 21).
The literature in this area is vast. See Gundel et al. (1993) for their classic six-tiered Givenness Hierarchy on which cognitive status and givenness are deemed responsible for norms on appropriateness for use of referring expressions. Ariel (2001) advances a more fine-grained approach that emphasizes instead the degree of accessibility, but is similar to that of Gundel et al. insofar as her eighteen varieties of referential choices are ranked along a single scale. Kibrik (2011) advocates a multi-dimensional cognitive approach that, unlike Gundel et al. and Ariel, stresses the importance of extending beyond a single scale for determining referential choice. I am most sympathetic with a wider approach like Kibrik’s, who incorporates many of the insights of both Gundel et al. and Ariel. However, since my primary goal in this paper is only to establish the grammaticality of [13b] and like sentences, little turns upon the exact details in the explanation of why they sound marked in certain contexts.
Green (2006, 41, 96).
Various types of discourse initial referential choices abound even in circumstances in which the speaker and hearer are both capable of demonstratively identifying the referent and this is common knowledge between them. Some referential choices signal higher/lower/equal social standing in a particular context; others signal the particular variety or depth of familiarity. Rules governing which referential choice is appropriate in a given situation will typically be highly culturally sensitive.
In this example, nothing hinges upon the fact that the confederates might actually have names other than those given to them by the researchers. But if someone thought it mattered, tighten up the scenario to one in which the researchers actually use confederates who have the name they use in the experiment. A similar experiment could also be done on a computer-generated virtual world with physically-identical avatars that have been given names by the researchers.
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Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to Michael Glanzberg and Karen Lewis for their exceptionally sharp comments, both critical and constructive, on my presentations at the Ohio Reference Workshop and Pacific APA, respectively. Three anonymous referees offered extensive incisive comments on a previous draft that contributed to major improvements. For helpful feedback and discussion, thanks also to Ashley Atkins, Delia Fara, Simon Goldstein, Hans Kamp, Jeff King, Ora Matushansky, Michael Nelson, Geoffrey Nunberg, Dolf Rami, Francois Recanati, Josef Stern, and Ken Taylor.
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Jeshion, R. Referentialism and Predicativism About Proper Names. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 2), 363–404 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9700-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9700-3