WHEN NOUNS SURFACE AS VERBS 3 page

(c) Cooperation between speaker and listener. Shifting reference places a much greater obligation on the speaker and listener than does fixed sense and denotation. To use bachelor, the speaker must merely make certain that its denotation is correct – that the class of things it is intended to denote consists, say, of unmarried men. To use he, however, the speaker must also rely on the close cooperation of the listener, who must normally take note of such things as the speaker’s gestures, the people he has just mentioned, esoteric or private allusions, and other momentarily relevant facts about the conversation. That is, shifting reference requires a moment-to-moment cooperation that fixed sense and denotation do not. If contextuals with their shifting sense and denotation make similar demands, then we should expect moment-to-moment cooperation to be essential to their interpretation too.

Using these criteria, we will argue that innovative denominal verbs are contextuals. They have an indefinitely large number of potential senses; and their interpretation depends on the context, especially the cooperation of the speaker and listener. Once this is granted, innovative verbs must be dealt with differently from both purely denotational and indexical expressions.

2.2. Proper nouns. Denominal verbs based on proper nouns are common, although most are virtually complete idioms. There are agent verbs based on people’s names: diddle, dun, finagle, fudge, lynch, pander, philander – all current; and balb, bant, bishop, burke, dido, hector, marcel, nap, swartout – all obsolete. There are recipient verbs from names of people who met defeat, hanging, or similar fates: boycott, and the now obsolete burgoyne, cornwallis, dewitt, job. There are verbs from place names, most with complicated histories: the current charleston, meander, saunter, shanghai; and the obsolete barbadoes, chevy, copenhagen, dunkirk, japan, levant, maffick, rotterdam, stellenbosch. And there are instrument verbs based on company names: the current hoover, scotchtape, and xerox, and the obsolete archie, baby, and roneo.

Proper nouns, however, are also an excellent source of innovations, as in these attested examples: to Luchins out (to get stuck in problem-solving because of set as discovered by Luchins); to Shylock £2700 from the £17,000 raised; The wind Bernoullis around the building (speeds up according to Bernoulli’s Law); We then Kleinschmidted the DNA (used a method of visualizing DNA developed by Kleinschmidt); a conductor simply Elvira Madigans the movement to death (conducts soppily, as in the film Elvira Madigan); I wanted to Rosemary Woods out that conversation (erase as Woods is alleged to have done); you’re in danger of being Hieronymus Bosched (putin a nightmare setting); He is Svengaling her to death; She wasn’t Krishna’d out, she was only hippied out (affected as a member of the Krishna sect); the perils of Don Juaning; She seemingly malapropped; we all Wayned and Cagneyed – to buy breathing space from the guy who really did like to fight; and I WalterMitty’d. They are also easy to create: to Ralph Nader the insurance industry, to Valentino the woman, to Bonny and Clyde one’s way through the West, to TWA to New York, to Ajax the sink, and The canoe Titanicked on a rock in the river.

How are these innovations to be accounted for? In semantic theories as different as those of Mill 1843, Katz 1972, 1977, and Kripke 1972, 1977, proper names have reference but no sense. Harry Houdini is intended to pick out a specific historical individual, but not by virtue of a set of properties all or some of which that individual must satisfy – being an escape artist, an early airplane pilot, and an exposer of mediums. Rather, it is intended to pick him out by virtue of the fact that, at least for Kripke, the name rigidly designates him –picks him out in all possible worlds.

But if proper names are assumed to have no sense, where does the sense of the denominal verbs come from? In My sister Houdini’d her way out of the locked closet, uttered in the right context, Houdini has the sense ‘escape by trickery’. If the proper name Houdini has no sense, it provides no source for ‘escape by trickery’, let alone any other sense. It is as if ‘escape by trickery’ had been Houdini’d out of thin air. So Houdini the verb, although clearly the morphological child of Houdini the proper noun, cannot get its meaning from the parent noun in the expected way. Under these assumptions, it cannot be handled by such proposals as McCawley’s and Green’s, which derive the child’s sense from the parent’s.

Moreover, under the McCawley and Green proposals, Houdini the verb would be a purely denotational expression; but actually it is a contextual, a clear case of shifting sense and denotation. It depends for its interpretation on the context, and on the cooperation of the speaker and listener. For Sam to tell Helen My sister Houdini’d her way out of the locked closet, he must believe that they mutually know that Houdini was an escape artist. Mutual knowledge is used here in the technical sense of Lewis 1969 and Schiffer 1972 to mean that Sam and Helen each knows this particular fact about Houdini, each knows that the other knows the fact, each knows that the other knows that the other knows the fact, and so on. If Sam believed that Helen didn’t know about Houdini’s escape artistry (even though everyone else did), he couldn’t have used Houdini cooperatively on that occasion with the sense ‘escape by trickery’. Yet if he believed she knew about Houdini’s manner of death and his investigations of fake mediums (even though most other people didn’t), he could have expected her to understand Joe got Houdini’d in the stomach yesterday (‘hit hard without warning’) and I would love to Houdini those ESP experiments (‘expose as fraudulent by careful analysis’). In short, Houdini’s sense and denotation on each occasion depends on the time, place, and circumstances of its utterance. It depends not merely on one’s knowledge of English, but also on one’s knowledge of particular facts about Houdini the historical figure.

If Houdini is a contextual, it should have an indefinitely large number of potential senses; and it does. Indeed, it has as many senses as there are facts that speakers and listeners could mutually know about Houdini. In theory, that number is indefinitely large. In context, of course, the number is narrowed down to one; it must be, just as the indefinitely large number of possible referents for he is narrowed down to one. That is accomplished through the speaker’s and listener’s judicious use of contextual facts. We will consider how that is done later.

Against this analysis, however, one could argue that the verb Houdini is derived from a Houdini, a common noun, rather than Houdini, the proper noun. Since a Houdini can be purely denotational, as in He is a Houdini (the argument would go), the verb Houdini could be derived with a fixed sense and denotation. For one class of innovative denominal verbs, however, this is not a possible explanation. Consider the report by Herb Caen, in the San Francisco Chronicle, that a woman had been Jarvis-Ganned out of her Convention and Visitor’s Bureau job, where Jarvis-Gann is the name of a California tax-cut initiative that resulted in the axing of many jobs throughout the state. Caen didn’t mean that the job was eliminated by a Jarvis-Gann initiative (the common-noun interpretation), but by the Jarvis-Gann initiative. Another example appeared in the title of a 1966 Paul Simon song, A simple desultory Philippic, or how I was Robert McNamara’d into submission, where the person responsible for the submission was Robert McNamara himself. Similar innovations are easy to create: Richard M. Nixon was John Deaned right out of the White House; General Motors was Ralph Nadered into stopping production of the Corvair; Napoleon was Waterlooed in 1813; and The medium Margery of Boston was Houdini’d into disgrace in 1924. If these proper nouns are assumed to have a reference but no sense, then the previous arguments apply, and these verbs must be contextuals.

Even under the common-noun proposal, however, the verb Houdini must be a contextual. Note that a Houdini is itself an innovation, whose sense and denotation on each occasion depends on the speaker’s and listener’s mutual knowledge about Houdini and the context. So if the verb Houdini is formed from a Houdini, it too must be a contextual. At present, we know of no evidence favoring either Houdini’s direct formation from the proper noun or its indirect formation via the common noun. We will assume the direct route, although nothing critical to our argument hangs on that assumption.

2.3. Common nouns. Unlike proper nouns, most common nouns have a sense that could conceivably serve as the basis for the sense of innovative verbs. To loaf the dough, for example, might be derived from something like to cause the dough to come to be like a loaf. The sense of the lexical constants cause, come, be, and like would be conflated with the sense of loaf, to form the sense of to loaf. This is the essence of Green’s and McCawley’s approaches.

The trick is to find the right lexical constants. Thus Green argues that instrument verbs (like hammer and radio) are derived from ‘as by using NP (on) in the usual manner, for the purpose for which it was designed’. Given the hammer’s design and usual manner of use, hammer gets roughly the right interpretation in hammer the nail into the board and hammer on his head with a shoe. The representation also accounts for such innovations as unicycle down the street, autoclave the scalpels, and keypunch the data.

Counter-examples, however, are easy to find. On the BBC in 1976, a demonstrator complained, We were stoned and bottled by the spectators as we marched down the street;and the (London) Observer noted that battered wives may be stabbed or bottled as well as punched. Bottles, of course, are designed for storing liquid, as reflected in bottle the beer; yet both innovations are perfectly interpretable. Most objects can be used for purposes for which they weren’t designed, and denominal verbs can reflect those purposes. This is also shown in such innovations as celluloid the door open (‘use a credit card to spring the lock open’, from the San Francisco Chronicle), hairpin the lock open – and, from a Time Magazine article on pie-throwing, pie the woman in a local doughnut store.

What is critical for innovative instrument verbs is not normal function or usual manner, as Green claims, but the speaker’s and listener’s mutual knowledge, along with certain other criteria. Imagine that Ed and Joe have an odd mutual acquaintance. Max, who occasionally sneaks up and strokes the back of people’s legs with a teapot. One day Ed tells Joe, Well, this time Max has gone too far. He tried to teapot a policeman. Joe arrives at teapot’s sense, ‘rub the back of the leg with a teapot’, not by using Green’s normal function, but by finding a situation that is consistent with Ed’s and Joe’s mutual knowledge about Max and teapots – the situation Joe thinks Ed intended to denote. If Ed hadn’t believed that Joe knew about Max’s compulsion, he couldn’t have meant what he did, nor expected Joe to see what he meant.

So teapot, like Houdini, is a contextual, with a shifting sense and denotation. First, teapot has an indefinitely large number of possible senses. It has as many senses as there are Max-like stories that one could contrive, and that number is without limit. Second, its sense and denotation on each occasion depend on the context. If teapot the policeman had been uttered under different circumstances, it could have had the sense ‘bash a teapot over the head of’, ‘offer a teapot to’, ‘turn by sorcery into the shape of a teapot’, etc. Note, incidentally, that in each of these senses, the verb teapot ‘relies’ in part on the fixed sense of the noun teapot in denoting teapots. It is just that, of the many situations in which teapots can play a role, the one intended can only be determined at the time of utterance. Third, the sense of teapot intended on each occasion depends critically on the cooperation of the speaker and listener. They must assess their mutual knowledge at the moment, and use other constraints that we will take up later. What holds for teapot appears to hold for every other innovative denominal verb, as well. Thus innovative verbs formed from common nouns appear to be contextuals too.

Although Green’s representation for instrument verbs makes them appear to have a fixed sense and denotation, that isn’t really so. Note that her representation contains the phrases ‘the usual manner’ and ‘the purpose for which it was designed’ – both indexical expressions whose referents change with the time, place, and circumstances of the utterance. Both phrases refer to facts that presumably lie outside one’s linguistic knowledge. Since these indexicals depend on context, so must the senses that contain them; and the same obviously holds for many of our initial paraphrases. The one for butcher ‘do the act that one would normally expect a butcher to do’ hides an assortment of similar indexicals, as does the one for bicycle. Treating innovative verbs as contextuals makes quite explicit what up to now has always been implicit in such paraphrases.

3. A theory of interpretation. If innovative denominal verbs are contextuals, they cannot be accounted for by the traditional theories that assume fixed sense and denotation. They require a theory of what a speaker means in uttering such a verb on particular occasions – a theory of interpretation. Note that the indexical he, which has shifting reference, requires a theory that characterizes how its referent is determined for each utterance. The theory must specify when a speaker has good grounds for believing that the listener can, on the basis of their mutual knowledge, identify its referent uniquely. The same goes for innovative denominal verbs, which have shifting sense and denotation. They require a theory that characterizes how their senses are determined in each utterance. Our first task is to outline such a theory.

3.1. Interpreting innovations. At the heart of this theory is a convention, in Lewis’s sense, about the use of language. The idea is this. Infusing an expression sincerely, the speaker intends the listener to come to a unique interpretation of what he has said – not from the meanings, of the words alone, but also on the assumption that the speaker has good grounds for thinking that the listener can come to that interpretation uniquely on the basis of what they mutually know. This convention is obviously akin to Grice’s cooperative principle. For innovative denominal verbs, the convention takes this particular form:

(23) The innovative denominal verb convention. In using an innovative denominal verb sincerely, the speaker means to denote

(a) the kind of situation

(b) that he has good reason to believe

(c) that on this occasion the listener can readily compute

(d) uniquely

(e) on the basis of their mutual knowledge

(f) in such a way that the parent noun denotes one role in the

situation, and the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote other roles in the situation.

‘Situation’ is being used here as a cover term for states, events, and processes.

This convention, in effect, has two parts. Conditions 23a–e, or something like them, appear to apply to all contextuals. The condition specific to denominal verbs is 23f, which refers to the syntactic structure of denominal verbs as opposed to compound nouns, shorthand expressions, or other contextual expressions. The importance of these conditions will become clear as we proceed.

To see how this convention applies, imagine a news agent one day insisting to us that The boy porched the newspaper. By the convention, the news agent had in mind a kind of situation he felt we would be able to identify uniquely from our mutual knowledge ofporches, their relation to newspapers, paper boys, and the topic of conversation – the boy’s delivery of the newspaper. To be so confident, he must have judged that this kind of situation would be salient – conspicuously unique, given our mutual knowledge or beliefs. What could be so salient? A distinguishing characteristic of porches is that they are shelters adjacent to the main door into a house. They are associated with a state that can, for convenience, be expressed as the propositional function On (x, a porch) – ‘x is on a porch’, where x is ordinarily something susceptible of being sheltered. The direct object of porched,namely the newspaper, refers to an entity that fits x’s specifications, so we have On (the newspaper, a porch). To use up the surface subject the boy, we can best view this state as the consequence of the boy’s action, adding the inchoative Come-about (x), the causative Cause(x, y), and the act Do (x, y) to give 24 and its paraphrase 25:

(24) Cause (Do (the boy, something), Come-about (On (the newspaper, a porch)))

(25) The boy did something to cause it to come about that [the newspaper was on a porch].

As part of this reasoning, we also realize that the news agent’s topic of conversation was newspaper deliveries; and that he mentioned the paper boy, the newspaper, and a porch. On these grounds alone, we could infer that he very likely intended porch to denote the act of the boy’s delivering the newspaper onto the porch. That agrees with 24 to give us more confidence in our inductive inference.

This, however, isn’t enough. The propositions in 24 express only the bare bones of what the news agent meant. From The boy porched the newspaper, we wouldn’t infer that the boy had pinned the newspaper page by page to the inside of the porch. The news agent wouldn’t have had good reason to think we could arrive at that interpretation uniquely. From our mutual knowledge, we are warranted in inferring only the ordinary manner of delivery. The kind of situation denoted has to be the most salient one under the circumstances; and the ordinary manner is the most salient unless there is good reason to think otherwise.

This convention, therefore, relies critically on a theory of what people know about concrete objects. Although such a theory is not available, there are strong suggestions about what it might look like from the work of Berlin, Breedlove & Raven 1968, 1973; Brown 1976; Brown et al. 1976; Hampton 1976; Smith, Shoben & Rips 1974; Rips, Shoben & Smith 1973; Smith, Rips & Shoben 1974; Smith 1978; and Rosch and her colleagues. We will begin by outlining a suitably-framed theory suggested by this work. The aim, we emphasize, is not to establish a theory of real-world knowledge, but to outline an empirical enterprise that we claim must be worked out before one can have an adequate explanation of innovative denominal verbs.

3.2. world knowledge can be divided roughly into two parts. Genericknowledge is what people tacitly know about space and time, the basic physical laws, natural kinds, manufactured artifacts and their functions, and so on. People normally assume that generic knowledge doesn’t vary much from person to person; they believe that a large core of it is shared by friend and stranger alike. Particular knowledge, however, is what people tacitly know about particular or individual entities – particular objects, events, states, and processes. Particular knowledge depends critically on a person’s history. The particulars that one person knows – his parents, his experiences yesterday, and the person to whom he has just talked – won’t necessarily be particulars that the next person knows. The commonest denominal verbs, both idiomatic and innovative, depend mainly on generic knowledge about concrete objects; and so it is important to understand what this knowledge might be like.

Our first premise is that people have generic theories about concrete objects, theories they use for categorizing objects. These theories specify three basic aspects of an object: its physical characteristics, its ontogeny, and its potential roles. The theory for ordinary bricks, for example, specifies (a) the normal range of their physical characteristics, e.g. their color, shape, weight, and breakability; (b) their normal ontogeny, e.g. that they are molded from clay, baked in ovens, and sold by building-supply firms; and (c)their potential roles, e.g. that they are ordinarily cemented with mortar in horizontal rows to form walls, are sometimes used as doorstops, and can be used as riot missiles. These theories, we assume, have evolved to be conceptually optimal; in these three respects, the objects within a category are as similar as possible to each other, and as different as possible from objects in neighboring categories at the same level of abstraction. This assumption has empirical support in Rosch & Mervis.

These theories are essential in order for people to deal effectively with the world around them. If something looks like a brick, people must be able to infer that it probably has certain other physical characteristics, the normal brick ontogeny, and the potential to play the normal brick roles. Without such a theory, each new brick would have to be treated as novel and without predictable properties. Animals must also have such theories, of course; the ability to categorize isn’t an exclusively human prerogative.

Because of these theories, some objects are viewed as more central to (or typical of) a category than others. Red bricks, for example, are probably viewed as more typical of the category ‘brick’ than gold bricks, wooden bricks, glass bricks, bricks of cheese, or bricks of ice cream: red bricks fit people’s theory for bricks best. As has been shown by Rosch & Mervis and by Hampton, the more properties an object shares with other objects in a category, the more typical of that category it is judged to be.

The properties within each theory, however, do not carry equal weight; some are more central to the characterization of the category than others. The most central of these we will call predominant features. Thus predominant features of bricks seem to be their box shape and child’s-shoebox size. The brick’s other physical characteristics, ontogeny, and potential roles seem generally less central, although not equally so. The predominant feature of orphans, in contrast, is a fact about their ontogeny: they are people whose parents died before they were raised. The predominant feature of vehicles is the fact about their potential role that they are used for transportation.

What exactly are predominant features? Our hypothesis is that they can be derived from notions of ‘cue validity’. According to work by Rosch and her colleagues and Tversky, the categories that people prefer for natural objects and human artifacts are those that maximize both the similarity between any two members of the same category and the dissimilarity between any two members of different categories. That is, the categories maximize ‘cue validity’: the more that cues or features are associated with the members of a category, and not with the members of other categories at the same level, the better that category is. As for any particular cue, the more it distinguishes the members of the category from the members of other categories, the more valid it is said to be. Formally, cue validity can be defined very precisely.

Since there has been little discussion of the practical identification of predominant features, we will offer several tentative procedures. A predominant feature of a category is one that tends to hold for most of its members –especially its typical members – but not for members of neighboring categories. So a predominant feature of a widow is that she is a woman whose current social status is the result of her husband’s being deceased. Being human, adult, or female are not by themselves predominant features of widows – since these do not distinguish widows from wives, spinsters, husbands, and widowers. When a predominant feature is relational, its relation to a second category tends to be asymmetric; thus a predominant feature of quivers is that they are for holding arrows. If arrows didn’t exist, neither would quivers. But it is not a predominant feature of arrows that they can go in quivers, since arrows can exist on their own. Not all asymmetric relations take this form: parts tend to be related to their wholes, not vice versa. It is a predominant feature of arms that they are related to the whole body, but not vice versa. Note that a category may have more than one predominant feature, since it may be distinguished from different kinds of neighbors in different respects.

How, then, do concrete nouns work? Our assumption is that, in using a concrete noun, a speaker intends to denote objects by virtue of their membership in the category defined by the appropriate generic theory. In using brick, a speaker intends to denote the kind of object that fits his theory for bricks. For this to succeed, speakers and listeners must share roughly the same generic theory for bricks. The work on categories shows that this is a reasonable assumption – at least for the most prominent real-world categories, those named most simply within languages.

Under this view, concrete nouns are related in meaning to the extent that the theories conventionally associated with them are related. One way in which two theories are related is by predominant features. ‘Ball’ and ‘brick’ form one class of theories, because both have predominant features that specify size and shape. ‘Widow’ and ‘orphan’ form another, because both have predominant features that concern ontogeny. And ‘tool’ and ‘vehicle’ form a third class, because both have predominant features that specify potential roles. These classes, of course, can be further subdivided according to the kinds of physical characteristics, ontogeny, and potential roles that are referred to in the predominant features.

When the parent nouns of denominal verbs are classified in this way, we argue, they fall into classes and subclasses that correspond closely (if not exactly) with the classes and subclasses that we arrived at in our analysis of denominal verbs. Briefly, the parent nouns can be classified according to their predominant features roughly as follows:

(a) Placeables. The parent nouns of locatum verbs denote placeables –things whose conventional role is to be placed with respect to other objects. A predominant feature of carpets, for example, is that they potentially go on floors. Note that carpets depend for their characterization on floors, not the reverse. So the right characterization of carpets is as placeables (carpets go on floors), not as places (floors go under carpets).

(b) Places. For location verb, the parent nouns denote places – things with respect to which other objects are conventionally placed. Thus a predominant feature of kennels is that they are places where one ordinarily keeps dogs. Note that kennels rely for their characterization on dogs, whereas dogs can exist without kennels.

(c) Time intervals. The parent nouns of duration verbs denote time intervals – temporal ‘places’ in which events and processes can be located. Thus summers consist of June, July, and August, aspecific time interval.

(d) Agents. The parent nouns of agent verbs denote agents, things whose predominant feature is that they do certain things. Butchers cut meat professionally; companions accompany people; and tailors make clothes professionally.

(e) Receivers. The parent nouns of experiencer verbs denote things picked out for their role in receiving or experiencing things, e.g. witnesses.

(f) Results. With goal verbs, ontogeny is important. Their parent nouns denote results, entities whose predominant feature is that they are end-products of some action or transformation. Thus widows form a category because they are a social product caused by the loss of their husbands. For many results, like braids, powder, and sandwiches, physical characteristics are also important: the end-product is distinguished not just by the action or transformation carried out, but also by the physical characteristics that result.

(g) Antecedents. For source verbs, ontogeny is also important, but the parent nouns denote antecedents – the beginnings, not the final states – of some actions or transformations. A predominant feature of some types of pieces, for example, is that they are things out of which some products can be made.

(h) Instruments. The things denoted by the parent nouns of instrument verbs are picked out for their potential roles as instruments. One of their predominant features is that they must be physically present for certain actions to take place, or for certain results to be accomplished. It is a predominant feature of ambulances that they are instruments for transporting the sick or wounded; a predominant feature of glue is that it is an instrument for attaching one object to another. These eight categories, of course, do not exhaust the way predominant features can be classified. The miscellaneous denominal verbs have special predominant features; six of the eight categories are susceptible to a finer analysis; and some predominant features can be cross-classified – e.g., those of both places and placeables concern location. At this time, more detail would help very little.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 747