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Analysis of Geographical Proper Names in Terms of the Indexicality Account of Proper Names

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Book cover Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9405))

Abstract

This paper focuses on geographical names, which are names of geographical regions. Geographical and personal names will be distinguished with reference to evidence from linguistics as well as cognitive science. Since the entire debate is on the relationship between geographical names and their bearers, the reference of geographical names in the context of use will be examined and two possible views on geographical name reference will be proposed. As a test case, the cases of geographical developments will be examined. The basic idea involves extending the indexicality account with generic names. If a geographical name is used in the standard context, it refers to specific geographical territory, whose development is tracked by discursive participants through (a) the causal history of communications of the name in question and (b) its current referred territory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I do not address the issue of temporal names, including whether such names exist.

  2. 2.

    The notion of generic names will be explained in Sect. 4.1.

  3. 3.

    One can see some disanalogies between personal pronouns and names here, because the lexical meanings of pronouns work as intensional characterization of the class in question. Contrastingly, as far as personal names are concerned, there is no properties shared among referents of a name except for being named such and such.

  4. 4.

    The strong/weak distinction is “a rather arbitrary matter” [11, fn. 77 (p. 517)] from the cross-lingual perspectives. For example, Russian personal names are strong as well as geographical names.

  5. 5.

    Naïve Millians, such as Salmon [16], treated proper names as syntactically simple. Thus, they appear to claim that English weak proper names, like “the Pacific Ocean,” are not proper names but definite descriptions. However, this distinction is not justified both linguistically and philosophically.

  6. 6.

    Furthermore, it is highly doubtful whether the following sentence is acceptable:

    1. (7)

      My great grandmother met Dickens, whome I read.

  7. 7.

    Of course, there are metonymical usages of geographical names. For example, observe the following article title:

    1. (8)

      Seoul Surprises with Interest Rate Cut. [24]

    “Seoul” used here is neither the geographical territory nor the city hall. For example, it is doubtful whether the following is acceptable:

    1. (9)

      \(^?\)The city surprises with interest rate cut.

    Rather, “Seoul” is used to metonymically refer to the Bank of Korea that has its headquarter in Seoul.

  8. 8.

    I use the term “default referent” as a neutral term between the indexicality and homonymy accounts.

  9. 9.

    From “Demographia”: http://www.demographia.com/dm-par90.htm (seen on Jan. 26, 2014).

  10. 10.

    However, it is not the aim of this paper to discuss the metaphysics of social institutions (see, e.g., [9] for some overview).

  11. 11.

    This notion of social entity, whatever it is, must be clearly separated from that of stereotype. For example, a district in Paris, in which there are only Starbuck’s instead of cafes, is not stereotypical to Paris such that we would like to claim: “This is not Paris.”

    Discussing stereotypes is not relevant for the issue because one can construct equivalent examples for all sorts of expressions, including common nouns or verbs.

  12. 12.

    From the same reason, the Weaker view of the indexicality account (which Stojanovic [20] examined) does not come into consideration here.

  13. 13.

    The earlier versions of this paper were presented at Nihon University (July, 2014), Universität Stuttgart (December, 2014), and University of Tokyo (April, 2015). I am grateful for the comments and questions raised by the participants. Luca Gasparri, Masaya Mine, and Isidora Stojanovic provided some materials in preparing this paper. I learned much from discussions with Masahide Asano, Naoya Fujikawa, Luca Gasparri, Yoichi Matsusaka, Yutaka Morinaga, Christoph Michel, Francois Recanati, Tsubasa Tsushima, Masahide Yotsu (in alphabetical order) and three anonymous reviewers. Despite all the fruitful discussions, the remaining mistakes are of course all mine. This research is funded by JSPS-Kakenhi (26-7077).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan

    Tomoo Ueda

  2. Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, France

    Tomoo Ueda

  3. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan

    Tomoo Ueda

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  1. Tomoo Ueda
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Correspondence to Tomoo Ueda .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Henning Christiansen

  2. ENS-Pavillon Jardin, CNRS-Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, France

    Isidora Stojanovic

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Aglantzia, Cyprus

    George A. Papadopoulos

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Ueda, T. (2015). Analysis of Geographical Proper Names in Terms of the Indexicality Account of Proper Names. In: Christiansen, H., Stojanovic, I., Papadopoulos, G. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9405. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25591-0_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25591-0_23

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