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Situations and Individuals Forthcoming with MIT Press Current Studies in Linguistics Summer 2005 Situations and Individuals Paul Elbourne To my father To the memory of my mother Preface This book deals with the semantics of the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals: pronouns, definite descriptions and proper names. It claims, contrary to previous theorizing, that they have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that which is currently associated by philosophers and linguists with definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. As well as advancing this proposal, I hope to achieve at least one other aim, that of urging linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation, in particular donkey anaphora, to consider a wider range of theories at all times than is sometimes done at present. I am thinking particularly of the gulf that seems to have emerged between those who practice some version of dynamic semantics (including DRT) and those who eschew this approach and claim that the semantics of donkey pronouns crucially involves definite descriptions (if they consider donkey anaphora at all). In my opinion there is too little work directly comparing the claims of these two schools (for that is what they amount to) and testing them against the data in the way that any two rival theories might be tested. (Irene Heim’s 1990 article in Linguistics and Philosophy does this, and largely inspired my own project, but I know of no other attempts.) I have tried to remedy that in this book. I ultimately come down on the side of definite descriptions and against dynamic semantics; but that preference is really of secondary importance beside the attempt at a systematic comparative project. I owe a great intellectual debt to Irene Heim, whose writings and comments have inspired and improved this work at all stages of its production. This book is a revised version of my 2002 MIT PhD thesis of the same title, for which Irene served as the chair of my committee. I also owe a great deal to the other members of that commit- tee, Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox and Michael Glanzberg, for the many hours they have spent insightfully discussing this material with me. For detailed comments on drafts of various chapters, often in the form of earlier papers, I am very grateful to Daniel B¨uring,Noam Chomsky, Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox, Michael Glanzberg, Dan Hardt, 3 Irene Heim, Sabine Iatridou, Stephen Neale, Uli Sauerland, Bernhard Schwarz and an anonymous Natural Language Semantics reviewer. I am especially grateful to Stephen Neale, who kindly acted as reviewer for the MIT Press and provided thought-clarifying comments in a very short space of time. For other valuable discussion and comments I thank Klaus Abels, Karlos Arregi, Mark Baltin, Abbas Benmamoun, Chris Barker, Lina Choueiri, Kit Fine, Lila Gleitman, Jim Higginbotham, Hajime Hoji, Polly Jacob- son, David Kaplan, Richard Kayne, Ed Keenan, Richard Larson, Julie Legate, Lau- ren Macioce, Alec Marantz, Luisa Marti, Lisa Matthewson, Jason Merchant, Shigeru Miyagawa, Barbara Partee, Christopher Peacocke, David Pesetsky, Colin Phillips, Paul Postal, Liina Pylkk¨anen,Tanya Reinhart, Mats Rooth, Barry Schein, Stephen Schiffer, Yael Sharvit, Michal Starke, Anna Szabolcsi, Satoshi Tomioka, Karina Wilk- inson, Alexander Williams, Ruth Yudkin, two anonymous SALT reviewers and five anonymous WCCFL reviewers. Special thanks to Ken Hiraiwa, Shinichiro Ishihara, Shigeru Miyagawa, Shogo Suzuki and an anonymous FAJL 3 reviewer for giving me Japanese judgments and helping me construct examples for Chapters 1 and 5. Chapter 2 of the present work is a revised version of Elbourne 2001a, which appeared in Natural Language Semantics. Material from this article is reprinted here with the kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. I am extraordinarily thankful to my friends for keeping me surprisingly relaxed and happy over the last few years. Invidious as it may be to single out a proper subset thereof, I cannot neglect to thank Lee Jackson and Joanne Dixon, for much hospitality and good cheer, and my academic, avocational and moral advisers S´ıofra Pierse and Liina Pylkk¨anen.S´ıofra, vivamus, mea Hibernica, atque amemus. With gratitude for everything, this book is dedicated to my father, David El- bourne, and to the memory of my mother, Jacqueline Elbourne. 4 Contents 1 Introduction 9 1.1 Overview of the Book . 9 1.2 Accounting for Covariation . 11 1.3 The Description-Theoretic Approach . 14 1.3.1 Outline of the Description-Theoretic Approach . 14 1.3.2 Problems with the Description-Theoretic Approach . 22 1.4 Dynamic Theories . 24 1.4.1 Outline of the Dynamic Approach . 24 1.4.2 Problems with the Dynamic Approach . 32 1.5 A Variable-Free Theory of Donkey Anaphora . 49 1.5.1 Outline of the Variable-Free Theory . 49 1.5.2 Problems with the Variable-Free Theory . 54 1.6 Conclusion . 56 2 D-Type Pronouns 58 2.1 Introduction . 58 2.1.1 The Proposal in Brief . 58 2.1.2 The Assimilation of Pronouns to Determiners . 60 2.1.3 NP-Deletion . 62 2.2 Semantics . 67 2.2.1 Background . 67 2.2.2 Ontological Ingredients (Kratzer 1989) . 70 2.2.3 Rules (after Heim and Kratzer 1998) . 70 5 2.2.4 Sample Lexical Entries . 71 2.3 The Truth Conditions of Donkey Sentences . 72 2.3.1 Examples with if-clauses . 72 2.3.2 Donkey Sentences with QP and Relative Clause . 74 2.3.3 Discussion of Quantification . 75 2.4 The Problem of the Formal Link . 87 2.4.1 The Problem . 87 2.4.2 Previous Solutions . 88 2.4.3 The Solution according to the NP-Deletion Theory . 92 2.5 Donkey Sentences and Strict/Sloppy Identity . 92 2.5.1 A New Problem for the D-type Analysis . 92 2.5.2 The Consequences for Variable-Free Semantics . 95 2.5.3 A Solution using the NP-Deletion Theory . 97 2.6 The Other Uses for D-Type Pronouns . 106 2.6.1 Bach-Peters Sentences . 107 2.6.2 Quantificational and Modal Subordination . 108 2.6.3 Paycheck Sentences . 109 2.7 Some Objections . 111 2.7.1 Weak Readings . 112 2.7.2 Split Antecedents . 113 2.7.3 Tomioka Sentences . 119 2.8 Conclusion . 122 3 On the Semantics of Pronouns and Definite Articles 124 3.1 Introduction . 124 3.2 Bound and Referential Pronouns . 125 3.2.1 Pronouns as variables: Heim and Kratzer 1998 . 125 3.2.2 Unifying the variable and definite article analyses . 127 3.2.3 Summary . 130 3.3 The Semantics of the Definite Article . 131 6 3.3.1 Fregean versus Russellian Approaches . 131 3.3.2 The Argument Structure of the Definite Article . 148 3.3.3 Two Consequences of the New Argument Structure . 153 3.4 Pronoun plus Relative Clause . 159 3.5 Pronouns Revisited . 162 3.5.1 The Case for Two Arguments for Pronouns . 162 3.5.2 Focused Bound Pronouns . 168 3.5.3 Resumptive Pronouns . 174 3.6 Conclusion . 178 4 Indistinguishable Participants 180 4.1 The Nature of the Problem . 180 4.2 Previous D-Type Solutions . 182 4.2.1 Neale 1990 . 182 4.2.2 Heim 1990 . 184 4.2.3 Ludlow 1994 . 186 4.3 The Problem of Coordinate Subjects . 190 4.4 A New D-Type Solution . 192 4.4.1 Transitive Cases . 192 4.4.2 Intransitive Cases . 201 4.5 Conclusion . 206 5 Japanese kare and kanozyo 207 5.1 Introduction . 207 5.2 The Basic Data . 207 5.3 Previous accounts . 209 5.4 A New Account . 213 5.5 Consequences for Other Theories . 215 5.5.1 A Problem for Dynamic Semantics . 215 5.5.2 A Problem for Variable-Free Semantics . 216 5.6 A Residual Problem . 216 7 5.7 Conclusion . 219 6 Proper Names 220 6.1 Introduction . 220 6.1.1 Extending the Analysis to Names . 220 6.1.2 The Theory of Burge 1973 . 221 6.1.3 A Revised Version . 224 6.2 Kripke’s Objections to Descriptive Theories . 226 6.2.1 The Modal Objection . 227 6.2.2 The Circularity Objection . 232 6.2.3 The Generality Objection . 232 6.3 Further Evidence in Favor of Burge’s Theory . 233 6.3.1 N to D Raising in Italian . 233 6.3.2 An Argument from Distribution . 234 6.3.3 D-Type Proper Names . 235 6.3.4 Naming Hypothetical Entities . 238 6.4 Conclusion . 241 7 Conclusion 242 7.1 Expressions of Type e . 242 7.2 Accounting for Donkey Anaphora . 243 7.3 Situations . 243 A DPL Calculations 246 A.1 A Conditional Donkey Sentence in DPL . 246 A.2 A Relative Clause Donkey Sentence in DPL . 247 B Situation Semantics Calculations 249 B.1 A Conditional Donkey Sentence . 249 B.2 A Relative Clause Donkey Sentence . 254 8 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview of the Book This book argues that those natural language expressions that semanticists take to refer to individuals — pronouns, proper names and definite descriptions1 — share more than just their semantic type. In fact, the syntax and semantics of all these expressions is based around one common structure: a definite article (or other definite determiner) which takes two arguments: an index and an NP predicate. In the course of the argumentation, it is shown that proper names have previously undetected don- key anaphoric readings. This fact has deleterious consequences for what philosophers call the direct reference theory, which holds that the sole contribution of proper names (and maybe other items) to the truth conditions of sentences in which they occur is an individual.
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