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Pragmatics and the Social Life of the English Definite Article Eric K PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH DEFINITE ARTICLE ERIC K. A CTON Eastern Michigan University Eckert (2008) rightly points out that context, variation, and indexicality are inextricably bound. This work—an in-depth case study of the social significance of the English definite article— presents a picture whereby semantic meaning is part of that same web of interrelations. The primary empirical claim of this work is that using the with a plural NP (e.g. the Americans ) to talk about all or typical members of a group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith separate from the speaker, and to an extent that using a bare plural (e.g. Americans ) does not. I present two varia - tionist, corpus-based studies that provide clear evidence of this effect. I then provide a principled account of the effect, building on the insights of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research and ex - tending their collective reach. As I show, the effect is largely rooted in crucial differences between the semantic meaning of the -plurals and that of related alternative expressions. As with a broad range of associated phenomena, the exact interpretation of a particular the -plural on a given occa - sion of use depends importantly upon its indexical character, the beliefs of the speech participants, and myriad other contextual factors, but is nonetheless constrained in a principled way.* Keywords : pragmatics, sociolinguistics, definiteness, social meaning, corpus linguistics, semantics ‘Let me be clear: I don’t trust the Republicans … ’ —US Republican Senator Ted Cruz, 2013 1. Introduction. The English definite article is most assuredly not a word to be tri - fled with. Research on the semantics of definites predates the invention of the talking pic - ture, and to date there is a lack of consensus even as to whether the carries an existence presupposition (Coppock & Beaver 2012), let alone agreement concerning uniqueness and familiarity (e.g. Strawson 1950, Birner & Ward 1994, Roberts 2002, Abbott 2008, Elbourne 2013). The demands the respect not only of the linguist and the grammarian but of the every - day English speaker as well. Indeed, speakers must wield the with care, for the use of this unassuming function word, commonest of all English expressions, can in fact send potent social signals. Reference to one’s own spouse as ‘the wife’, for example, paints a different picture of the speaker’s marriage than does a reference to ‘my wife’. At the very least, the former suggests extra distance between speaker and referent relative to the latter. And it is this same basic dynamic that US Republican Senator Ted Cruz ex - ploited in his ironic remark in the epigraph above, suggesting an outsider status vis-à- vis his own party. Example 1a likewise exhibits this meaning, where the Americans generally suggests that the speaker of 1a is not an American. Absent the , as in 1b, the ef - fect is diminished. (1) a. The Americans love cars. b. Americans love cars. This work—part of a larger project relating semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguis - tics—presents an in-depth study of the social meaning of the . Specifically, I show that using the with a plural NP (a ‘ the -plural’) to talk about all or typical members of a group * This work benefited immensely from the contributions of many people, among them Sara Acton, Alex Djalali, Penny Eckert, Rob Podesva, Chris Potts, Daniel Seely, Ewart Thomas, Elizabeth Traugott, and my students in the 2015 section of LING 535 at Eastern Michigan, as well as audiences at Eastern Michigan, Stanford, and LSA 2017. I am also deeply grateful to Megan Crowhurst, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Chris Kennedy, and two anonymous referees for their thoughtful and incisive reviews. This research was supported in part by an Eastern Michigan University Provost’s New Faculty Award. 37 Printed with the permission of Eric K. Acton. © 2019. 38 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 95, NUMBER 1 (2019) of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith of which the speaker is not a member—and to an extent that using a bare plural (BP) does not. Although using a the -plural very often does suggest that the speaker is not a member of the relevant group, is deemphasizing their membership in the group, or is emphasiz - ing their nonmembership 1—what I call the distancing effect of the -plurals—the meaning is not an entailment. In 2, for instance, it is clear that the Tea Party Patriots and the possessors implicit in our pertain to the same group of individuals. (2) The Tea Party Patriots depend on grassroots activism where it counts: near you. Local Groups are the backbone of our activities across the nation. (from the website of the ‘Tea Party Patriots’) 2 Being nonentailed, the meaning of interest does not fit squarely within the purview of semantics. This suggests a need to turn to the subdisciplines that address nonentailed meaning: namely pragmatics and, increasingly, sociolinguistics—particularly sociolin - guistics in the third wave of variation studies (Eckert 2012). Indeed, doing justice to the present phenomenon—and a broad class of related phenomena besides—means drawing from, connecting, and extending both traditions. Concerning sociolinguistics, the meaning of interest is social in nature in that it con - cerns the speaker’s relation to other individuals. Moreover, as I show in §3, the phe - nomenon is amenable to variationist research. Accordingly, sociolinguistics has much to offer here. However, the present case departs from the vast majority of variationist sociolinguistic research, for which the relevant variants do not bear propositional mean - ing themselves, or for which it is assumed ‘that distinctions in referential value among [variants] are neutralized in discourse’ (Tagliamonte & Denis 2014:97, citing Sankoff 1988:153; see also Romaine 1984, Cheshire 2005). Instead, the meaning of interest cru - cially depends upon differences between the encoded, semantic meaning of the -plurals and that of related alternative forms. Accordingly, pragmatics too has much to offer in the present case. Pragmatic research has greatly illuminated the dynamics by which utterances are enriched with nonentailed meanings (e.g. Grice 1975, Horn 1984, Sperber & Wilson 2004). At the same time, the present phenomenon (and many others like it) calls for extending the insights of previ - ous research and complementing them with sociolinguistic theory and methodology. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. I first provide a more thorough overview of the meanings of interest (§2), and then present two corpus-based, varia - tionist studies that show that the effect is clearly reflected in usage patterns and is sen - sitive to contextual factors (§3). In §4, I provide an overview of the insights that the traditions of pragmatics and sociolinguistics offer for explaining the distancing and monolithizing effects of the , and connect and extend these insights in §5 and §6 in order to explain these effects. As I show, a full account calls for an analysis that is at once semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic. Section 7 takes stock of the findings and the analytical approach of the present article, looking toward future sociolinguistic, prag - matic, and semantic research. 2. More examples of the meaning. As discussed with respect to example 1 and the epigraph from Ted Cruz, the use of the in talking about individuals often engenders a distancing effect. A 1958 book of photographs of life in the US titled The Americans provides another sharp illustration. Authored by Swiss-born photographer Robert 1 I thank a referee for the suggestion to foreground the set-membership basis of the distancing effect. 2 ‘Tea Party Patriots’; https://www.teapartypatriots.org/, last accessed July 10, 2015. Pragmatics and the social life of the English definite article 39 Frank, who immigrated to the US in 1947, ‘[i]t was initially dismissed as the jaundiced work of an unpatriotic cynic’ (McAlley 2009:n.p.). Arts critic Richard B. Woodward writes: ‘What was most upsetting about Mr. Frank’s take … was, first of all, the provocative title. It is as though the people in his pages were an alien species and he a more evolved anthropologist’ (Woodward 2009:n.p.). The title of a 2009 exhibition of Frank’s work at the National Gallery of Art, ‘Looking in: Robert Frank’s “The Ameri - cans” ’, further depicts Frank as an outsider. The same dynamics underlie the remarkability of Republican Donald Trump’s re - portedly frequent use of the phrase the Republicans . An article from the Economist , aptly titled ‘Outsiders’ chance’, observes: ‘Donald Trump … was once a registered De - mocrat and still refers derisively to his party as “the Republicans”, as if it is some un - promising acquisition he has been arm-twisted into buying’ ( Outsiders’ chance 2016 ). Additional evidence of the distancing effect of the can be found in its use in dis - paraging generalizations, discourse on marginalization, descriptions of social opposi - tions, and ‘us-versus-them’ rhetoric. (3) Faced with the prospect of a war against all, humans reformulate the conflict into a war of nearly all against a few—against the Jews or the communists or the gays or the feminists or the Mexican immigrants . (Placher 2009) (4) Paid for by Bernie 2016 (not the billionaires ). 3 (from US Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign website) (5) And I just ask some of you that are back on the East Coast, come down to the border and talk to those of us that have seen what happens when the politi - cians play politics with something that ends up costing people’s lives … (Republicans backed into a corner 2012) In each example, the relevant groups are depicted as separate, removed, or opposed. Moreover, I submit that in every case the removal of the would dull the tone of separa - tion or derogation to some extent.
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