Abstract
This paper argues that some familiar cases of interaction between definite descriptions and negation are not best analyzed as scope interactions. Attention to the role of focus, and a number of related semantic and pragmatic factors, shows that the cases give no evidence of scope interaction. However, these factors can generate an illusion of scope. In particular, focus can generate illusions of scope, which may lead us to think sentences display scope ambiguities they do not. These conclusions offer limited support to non-quantificational treatments of definite descriptions.
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- 1.
For instance, Neale (1990, p. 49) writes, ‘Since descriptions are treated as quantifiers ... all sorts of interesting scope interactions are predicted; not just with negation and other quantified noun phrases, but also with various types of nonextensional operators (Chapter 4).’
- 2.
Though they do not dwell on this particular kind of sentence, representative argument against scope ambiguity hypotheses include Kempson and Cormack (1981), Reinhart (1979, 1983), Wilson (1978). A defense of standard ambiguity claims can be found in Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990), while more recent criticism is offered by Pietroski and Hornstein (2002). Of course, if you do not accept that (2) is ambiguous, then you are not likely to see ambiguities with definite descriptions either, and so you may take the main claim of this paper as a given.
- 3.
For our purposes here, we may assume that the logical forms in question will mark scope differences in something like the way they are marked in (3). For discussion of how this may be implemented in syntactic theory, see Heim and Kratzer (1998), May (1985), or my survey (2006). It is a point of debate whether or not scope ambiguities in natural language really are syntactic ambiguities; see Jacobson (2002) for a critical discussion. Among those who do take them to be mainly syntactic, it is a point of contention whether the syntax of logical form completely suffices to disambiguate scope. May (1985) argues it does not. For detailed discussion of sentences like (2), see Acquaviva (1993) or Büring (1997), among places.
- 4.
I believe this kind of argument is in Neale (1990, Chapter 4). Neale does phrase things cautiously, saying that it is ‘at least arguable’ that sentences like these have the readings Russellians claim, and that ‘presumably’ they will be captured by the scope behavior of the definite description.
- 5.
In Russell (1905, 1919), he describes the theory as giving a way of associating the surface form of a sentence with a logical form, though that form does not contain any constituent directly corresponding to the definite article. In Whitehead and Russell (1927), descriptions are directly introduced as defined symbols of a formal language. (I am indebted to Fara (2001) for clarifying some of these points.)
- 6.
Other authors who endorse similar proposals include Sainsbury (1979) and Sharvey (1969).
- 7.
The idea that quantifiers are to be interpreted as sets of sets goes back to Frege (e.g. Frege, 1879, 1891). Contemporary development of the idea begins with Montague (1973), and then Barwise and Cooper (1981), Higginbotham and May (1981), and Keenan and Stavi (1986). The subsequent literature is huge, and the view of quantifiers they pioneered has become a mainstay of modern semantics. A survey targeted at philosophers is given in my (2006).
- 8.
These theories originate with Heim (1982) and Kamp (1984), and then Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991). For more recent surveys, see van Eijck and Kamp (1997) and Kadmon (2001).
- 9.
Fregean treatments of the definite article like (11) are given in Heim (1991) and Heim and Kratzer (1998). An extended defense is given in Elbourne (2005).
The label ‘Fregean’ is in some ways unfortunate, and might tend to mislead. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with the dispute between Fregeans and direct reference theorists in the theory of reference. In other work (Glanzberg, 2007), I have opted to call it the ‘\(e\)-type approach’, to emphasize that its main feature is interpreting definite descriptions as picking out individuals, and thus interpreting them differently from quantifiers. I avoid that terminology here, as the apparatus of types is not relevant to this discussion. Regardless, the label ‘Fregean’ has become more or less become standard.
- 10.
There are some technical complications for doing this. One way to do it is to introduce a kind of ‘default object’ of which no simple predicate holds. Other options including type shifting, or departures from classical logic. Some of these possibilities have been explored in the literature on choice functions (which is generally more concerned with indefinite than definite descriptions), notably by Reinhart (1997) and Winter (1997). Though it works in the setting of dynamic semantics, the comparisons of presuppositional and non-presuppositional treatments of descriptions in van Eijck (1993) is also noteworthy.
- 11.
As Heim and Kratzer (1998) note, there are some quantifiers which fairly clearly seem to carry presuppositions, including both and neither. There remains a lively dispute about whether all quantifiers carry a presupposition of non-empty domain. The idea that they do goes back to Strawson (1952), and has essentially been defended by Diesing (1992). Alternatively, it has been argued that some sub-classes of quantifiers carry such a presupposition, e.g. by Barwise and Cooper (1981). The view that it is exactly the so-called strong determiners that do so is developed by de Jong and Verkuyl (1985). The position that quantifiers do not generally carry presuppositions is defended by Lappin and Reinhart (1988).
- 12.
Abbot (2004, p.127) goes so far as to say, ‘Since the publication of Strawson’s paper, there has been fairly unanimous support for the intuitions he expressed, but less agreement on how best to give an account of these facts.’ I suspect a number of critics of Strawson, from Sellars (1954) to Neale (1990), might well have taken their points to cut deeper than that.
Definition (11) not only gives definite descriptions presuppositions, it makes these presuppositions conventional in nature, triggered by the semantics of the definite article. I think this is right, but I hasten to add that I do not think all of the presuppositions that have been discussed in the literature are this way. (For a recent survey of some ways presuppositions can be triggered, see Kadmon (2001). These issues are also discussed in my (2005b).) On the other extreme, there has been a long tradition of seeking to explain away presupposition as a combination of implicature and entailment. A survey especially sympathetic to this reductionist approach is given by Levinson (1983). Though I am not a proponent of the reductionist approach, the issue is not really one that is of importance here. An alternative semantics for definite descriptions, together with a different account of the source of their presuppositions, could serve the argument I shall give here equally well.
- 13.
The literature on the uniqueness of definites is huge. Some snapshots are to be found in Abbot (2004), Heim (1982), Kadmon (1990, 2001), and Roberts (2003), among many places.
- 14.
For surveys of some important ideas about presupposition projection, see Beaver (2001) and Kadmon (2001). Recent work especially concerned with examples like (13a) includes van der Sandt (1992), recent work especially concerned with examples like (13b) includes Heim (1992).
- 15.
Reading the capitals with ‘emphatic stress’ will mark focus. However, most thinking about the phonology of focus these days suggests that it is not the stress that marks the focus, but the intonational prominence that goes with it. In fact, many theorists hold that only a particular intonation contour (a particular pitch accent) marks focus. The right intonation is the one you hear in an appropriate answer to a question, as in (19). See Kadmon (2001) for a survey of some phonology relevant to focus, or the more extensive Ladd (1996). For our purposes here, I shall not worry about the phonological details, and continue to talk about ‘stress’. I am assuming that the phonology realizes an underlying focus feature, F, in logical form, so that the LF of a sentence like (18a) will look like John likes [Jane]F.
- 16.
For a more thorough, philosophically friendly discussion of focus, see my (2005a). Other surveys include Kadmon (2001), Kratzer (1991), Rooth (1996), and von Stechow (1991).
- 17.
Hamblin’s idea is modified and developed further by Karttunen (1977). An important alternative is presented in Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984).
- 18.
I am inclined to follow a number of authors, including Jackendoff (1972) and Rooth (1999), in holding that focal presupposition is too strong. For instance, Rooth offers the following example:
-
(i)
Did anyone win the football pool this week?
Probably not, because it is unlikely that MARY won it, and she is the only person who ever wins.
In this discourse, it is not presupposed that someone won the pool, but the focus is still felicitous. What seems to be required here is only that the set of alternatives for who won the pool has to be in the right way active in the discourse. As Jackendoff put it, these alternatives have to be ‘under discussion’ (p. 246). Of course, this view is highly controversial. Defenses of existential focal presupposition can be found in Geurts and van der Sandt (2004) and Herburger (2000). However, the issues that are at stake in this debate do not seem to be relevant to our discussion here, and it will simplify matters to talk about focal presupposition. So, even though I am inclined to the opposing view, I shall talk about focal presupposition for purposes of this discussion.
-
(i)
- 19.
Just what the discourse effect of focus is, and how it is generated, are explored by Roberts (1996) and Rooth (1992). Other approaches to the kind of semantic partition induced by focus include those that introduce structured propositions (e.g. Krifka, 1991; von Stechow, 1991), and those that partition a Davidsonian event decomposition (Herburger, 2000).
- 20.
An idea along these lines is considered by Chomsky (1976). Direct arguments against movement-based approaches to focus are given by Rooth (1985).
- 21.
For instance, Büring (1997) offers a very detailed analysis of (16). I should note that his analysis takes into account other aspects of the way information is marked phonologically and packaged in discourse than focus. His theory is fascinating and subtle, but we will have to make do with a much rougher-hewn explanation for the moment.
- 22.
See Herburger (2000) for an extensive discussion of the kinds of readings that can be generated by interactions between negation and focus. One attempt to work out an account of how focus and negation interact based on the semantics of negation is given by Kratzer (1989).
- 23.
In configurations like this, it might be that the negation is in focus (though when we look at the details of which pitch accents mark focus, this is not at all clear). It is more clear that material in the scope of the metalinguistic negation gets a special phonology: a kind of ‘quotation intonation’. In other configurations for metalinguistic negation, pitch accent on negation does not seem to be necessary, but the quotation marking does seem to be required. This has not, to my knowledge, been discussed at much length in the literature, but see Potts (2005). For a somewhat different take on the phenomena at issue here, see Geurts (1998).
- 24.
The characterization of positive polarity items as only being able to occur in non-negated environments is well-known to be very rough, and the empirical situation is in fact somewhat more subtle. For a survey of some of the issues involved, see Ladusaw (1996). Some recent discussions paying attention to positive polarity items include Progovac (1994), Szabolcsi (2004), and van der Wouden (1997). As an anonymous referee pointed out, this can make the application of the positive polarity item test difficult, as it requires sorting out whether we are seeing a metalinguistic negation, or one of the other constructions which make the generalization about negative environments subtle. Nonetheless, it does appear that the combined force of the tests, run on the particular construction in question, strongly indicates we have metalinguistic negation.
- 25.
For some discussion of the range of judgments seen for some related cases, see Reinhart (1995).
- 26.
I did try to explain some aspects of presupposition obviation, based on the way context is set by discourse, in my (2002). Early work on the problem includes Strawson’s own paper (1964) and Fodor (1979). The idea that there is still presupposition failure in cases of presupposition obviation, but that speakers are able to reach truth-value judgments regardless, is explored by von Fintel (2004) and Lasersohn (1993). Both of the latter, and my own contribution, offer ways we can make sense of presupposition obviation even for the kind of semantically coded presupposition that is built into (11).
- 27.
In (32a), the subject this pen will typically have a distinct intonation contour (a distinct pitch accent), which is often taken to mark a contrastive topic. The idea that focus, or more often the related notion of topic, is fundamental to presupposition obviation has been proposed by a number of authors, including Gundel (1974), Horn (1986), Kadmon (2001), Reinhart (1981, 1995), and the original Strawson (1964).
- 28.
The syntax literature offers some explanations of these sorts of effects, which might predict that we cannot get inverse scope readings in (36). It is commonly observed, for instance, that objects tend not to take wide scope in negative environments. See for instance, Aoun and Li (1993), for one approach to this issue. The division of quantifiers into types in Beghelli and Stowell (1997) predicts that monotone decreasing quantifiers in object position will generally not take wide scope.
- 29.
I reach similar conclusions for cases of interactions between definite descriptions and quantifiers in my (2007). Other kinds of cases, notably interactions with modals, have been discussed by Elbourne (2005) and Heim (1991), but sill raise a number of important issues.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kent Bach, Chris Barker, Paul Elbourne, John MacFarlane, Robert May, Paul Pietroski, Daniel Rothschild, Rob Stainton, the Bay Area Philosophy of Language Discussion Group, and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. A preliminary version of some of this material was presented in my seminar at UC Davis in 2005. Thanks to the participants there, especially Brian Bowman, Josh Parsons, and Paul Teller.
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Glanzberg, M. (2009). Descriptions, Negation, and Focus. In: Stainton, R.J., Viger, C. (eds) Compositionality, Context and Semantic Values. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 85. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8310-5_8
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