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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Friday, May 23, 3:30pm in 460-126:
Equatives and Deferred Reference
Gregory Ward, Northwestern University
One of the most creative, but least understood, features of colloquial
discourse is the possibility of deferred reference (Nunberg 1979, 1995):
the use of an expression to refer to an entity not denoted by the
conventional meaning of that expression. Consider the examples in (1),
uttered in the context of a luncheonette:
(1) a. [server to co-worker] The ham sandwich left me a big tip.
b. [customer to server holding a tray full of orders] I'm the ham
sandwich.
In (1a), the speaker's reference is `deferred' in the sense that he is
referring indirectly to the person who ordered the ham sandwich via the
ham sandwich itself. With the equative copular sentence in (1b), on the
other hand, the speaker is `equating' herself with her order to convey
indirectly that she is the ham sandwich orderer. In the spirit of Nunberg
(1979), I refer to such equatives as deferred equatives. In this paper, I
present arguments against previous accounts and provide a new theory of
deferred reference to accommodate examples like those in
(1). Specifically, I will be arguing against the notion of meaning
transfer and in favor of the notion of reference mapping. I claim that
felicitous use of both deferred equatives and deferred non-equatives
requires the presence of a contextually salient correspondence, or
mapping, to hold between sets of relevant discourse entities. In (1), the
relevant mapping is between the (inferred) set of deli customers and the
(evoked) set of their orders. In addition, the use of a deferred equative
requires the presence of a contextually licensed open proposition (OP)
that explicitly encodes the reference mapping. Finally, I present the
results of an empirical study (Ward & Tilsen 2002) in which subjects were
asked to rate various kinds of deferred equatives.
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
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This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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