My “dream” job, just a couple years early

Via Jack Sasson’s Agade list:

YALE UNIVERSITY, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is seeking to fill a full-time appointment as Lector or Senior Lector with responsibility to teach Aramaic, Advanced Syriac, Ugaritic, and Comparative Semitics, beginning July 1, 2010. Competence in further Semitic languages is welcomed. Ph.D. preferred but not required. Interest in the use of technology in teaching desirable.

That’s me! Unfortunately, I have no resume to speak of at this point and no prior teaching experience. Oh, and I don’t live anywhere near New Haven. Oh well.

More definiteness – the familiarity approach

As I mentioned in my last post, in studying definiteness, logical and semantic approaches tend to concentrate on issues such as existence and uniqueness and the truth or falsehood of a proposition in the real world. Discourse approaches, however, have been more interested in the pragmatics of definiteness, particularly the dynamic between the speaker and the hearer. For instance, I began my last post with the following pair of sentences:

(1a) I bought the car today.

(1b) I bought a car today.

Russell was primarily concerned with naming expressions such as “The King of France” or “Mr Jones” which have only one possible referent, but the expression “the car” in the sentence above can have an almost limitless number of possible referents. On the other hand, in the context, the phrases “the car” and “a car” have the same unique referent. What influences the choice of one phrase over the other?

The familiarity theory is usually traced to Paul Christophersen, who argued that the distinction between definite and indefinite noun phrases has to do with whether the hearer was presumed to be acquainted with the referent. Thus the difference between the two sentences in example 1 is that the car under discussion is known to the hearer in the first, but not in the second.

Note that Chafe has suggested that the term identifiability is preferable to familiarity. The distinction is that the hearer may not necessarily know the referent, but definiteness signals that they are in a position to identify it. Identifiability can be related to the prior introduction of a referent in the discourse (anaphora), the presence of the referent in the immediate situation (deixis), or the general knowledge of the hearer.

However, identifiability may not always be an adequate explanation of definiteness either. Lyons notes that so-called associative uses are the most problematic. In the associative use, a noun phrase is considered definite by its relation to a previous referent as in 2:

(2) I took a taxi to the airport, but the driver got lost.

Here it is understood that the driver is connected to the previously mentioned taxi. However, other than linking him to the taxi, the hearer is in no position to identify the particular driver. In such a case, definiteness may indeed be more about quantification than identifiability. That is, the sentence merely expresses that the taxi had a driver.

Fraurud has suggested, however, that the individuation of the referent may also be a factor. The identifiability approach tends to treat individuals as the prototypical referent, but individuals are identifiable in a different way from other kinds of entities such as classes and types, of which we may have general-lexical, but not personal, knowledge. Thus all that is necessary is to identify the driver as the taxi driver (there will be more on this in a future post).

Identifiability seems to be the prototypical use of definiteness cross-linguistically, and therefore, Lyons suggests that in general definiteness grammaticalizes this pragmatic category.  In fact, in the majority of cases, definite articles develop from demonstratives. However, it is reasonable to assume that over time in some languages the category of definiteness could be extended to other related uses such as inclusiveness as we saw earlier with plural and mass nouns. In this regard, it is interesting to note that indefinite articles tend to develop after definite articles from quantifiers such as one.

Additional Bibliography

Chafe, Wallace. “Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Point of View.” Pages 25-55 in Subject and Topic. Edited by Charles N. Li. New York: Academic Press, 1976.

Christophersen, Paul. The Articles: A Study of Their Theory and Use in English. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1939.

Fraurud, Kari. “Cognitive Ontology and NP Form.” Pages 65-88 in Reference and Referent Accessibility. Edited by Thorstein Fretheim, and Jeanette K. Gundel. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1996.

A closer look at definiteness – the uniqueness approach

In languages with the grammatical category of definiteness, the prototypical definite noun phrase is one marked with the definite article. This is usually contrasted with an indefinite article or bare noun phrase such as in example 1:

(1a) I bought the car today.

(1b) I bought a car today.

Explanations for the various uses of the definite article are complex, and the subject has attracted the attention of philosophers and logicians besides linguists and grammarians. The two most common explanations are the uniqueness and familiarity theories.

The uniqueness theory has its roots in the logical tradition and is usually traced to Bertrand Russell, who argued that the definite article requires existence and uniqueness as in example 2:

(2) The King of France is bald.

According to Russell this sentence implies three things:

(i) There is a King of France.

(ii) There is only one King of France.

(iii) This individual is bald.

Thus the use of the indefinite article, as in (i), merely asserts the existence of an individual meeting the description King of France, but the definite article also asserts his uniqueness.

Hawkins extended the uniqueness theory by arguing that the definite article actually expresses inclusiveness. His argument is that the referent of a definite description must be part of a shared set. In the case of an individual entity, it can be considered a singleton which is realized as uniqueness, but for plurals and mass nouns it includes everything that meets the description. For instance, consider the sentences in example 3:

(3a) We put the beer in the cooler.

(3b) We put beer in the cooler.

(3c) We put a beer in the cooler.

What is implied by sentence 3a is that all of the beer is now in the cooler. Here the difference between the definite, bare, and indefinite clearly has to do with quantification. Sentence 3b can be read as some beer was put in the cooler, while 3c implies that a certain unit of beer is meant.

In this approach, definite descriptions are not semantically referring, but only quantificational. This contrasts with proper nouns which have no “sense” but are merely pointers to the referent which they name. This follows Frege/Quine, and see also Saul Kripke on naming.

However, David McCawley pointed out exceptions such as example 4 that don’t seem to be explained by uniqueness or quantification:

(4) The dog got into a fight with another dog.

In this example there are two fighting dogs involved, but nothing particularly unique is expressed about the first dog. Therefore, David Lewis has argued that definiteness must relate to salience here rather than uniqueness, that is the first dog must be somehow more prominent in the discourse than the second.

One weakness of the uniqueness approach is that its logical roots were only concerned with the truth or falsehood of a statement, which should remain the same regardless of where or when it is expressed. Thus the approach only treats the noun phrase at the sentence level, rather than considering the larger discourse context. In contrast, discourse approaches tend to focus on the anaphoric use of definiteness, largely relying on the familiarity theory which I will summarize in the next post.

Bibliography

Hawkins, John A. Definiteness and Indefiniteness : A Study in Reference and Grammaticality Prediction. Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Croom Helm Humanities Press, 1978.

Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Lewis, David. “Scorekeeping in a Language Game.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979): 339-59.

Lyons, Christopher. Definiteness. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

McCawley, David. “Presupposition and Discourse Structure.” Pages 371-88 in Syntax and Semantics 11: Presupposition. Edited by David Dinneen, and Choon-kyu Oh. New York: Academic Press, 1979.

Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind 14 (1905): 479-93.

Definiteness, information structure, and the particle את in BH

In a new series of posts I would like to introduce the research project behind my dissertation. My hope is that in being transparent during the writing process I can receive good feedback beyond my primary readers. The danger of being too transparent, of course, is that someone may borrow some of my ideas. I will hunt you down and force you to listen to the entire Left Behind series on tape as read by Kirk Cameron (I’m sure it exists somewhere).

In Biblical Hebrew, the particle את is used primarily to mark the direct object. However, the distribution of its use does not seem to follow any obvious pattern. It occurs overwhelmingly with objects that are definite, but it is not obligatory with a definite object. Many have suggested that את developed from an emphatic particle, similar to the Greek αὐτός or Latin ipse, and that this use is retained in certain situations. Others, however, have explained the use or non-use of את as a matter of style and authorial choice.

In fact, the use of את for object marking in Biblical Hebrew is typical of a phenomenon that has been found in over 300 diverse languages, termed Differential Object Marking (DOM) by Georg Bossong. Unlike languages with full case systems, such as Classical Arabic or Latin, in DOM systems only a certain set of objects is overtly marked. While languages vary in their sensitivity to a particular parameter, the primary factors conditioning object marking seem to be the definiteness and animacy of the object.

The function of definiteness has proven complex to explain because it has roles in multiple levels of language. As a grammatical category, definiteness is generally considered binary – a given noun phrase is either marked definite or it is not. However, within the broader context of discourse, there is also a sense that definiteness can be a matter of degree based on the type of referring expression used (for instance, pronouns and proper nouns are generally taken to be higher in definiteness than noun phrases marked by the definite article).

This is especially noticeable in the interaction between definiteness and certain other grammatical processes, often termed a “definiteness effect”. For instance, in DOM languages sensitive to definiteness, there is a correlation between the relative “definiteness” of an object and the frequency of marking – the higher an object falls on the definiteness scale, the more likely it is to be marked.

In Biblical Hebrew, the study of definiteness has been somewhat neglected. The grammars suggest that definiteness in Hebrew is similar to English, and thus scholars only work with only an intuitive notion of definiteness. In my research, I will provide an overview of recent work on definiteness and use the profile of object marking to develop the notion of definiteness as a scalar within BH.

Information structure comes into play in the explanation of DOM. Some have argued that DOM serves to help differentiate the subject from the object, while others have suggested that it is related to the transitivity of a clause. However, the influence of definiteness and animacy on grammatical structures seems to be related to the pragmatic role of topic. Topics must be definite, and topic-worthiness is also related to animacy.  Roles such as subject and object seem to grammaticalize the structure of a proposition related to the topic, specifically subjects are overwhelmingly definite and animate and are usually taken to be the topic by default. I will argue, therefore, that the role of DOM is not to differentiate subject from object per se, but to specially mark the grammatical role of object when it might compete with the subject in topic-worthiness.

 

One step closer

This summer and fall I have been working on a paper that summarizes much of the linguistic research that forms the background of my dissertation topic. I finally finished and sent the paper off to my advisor yesterday, so if all goes well I can begin working on the actual dissertation proposal here in the next couple of weeks.

I have been neglecting my blog lately, but I will try to condense some of my research into a series of posts to give a sense of where my research is heading.

Goings on in the blogosphere

Ed Cook has written a post on the verbal system in BH poetry, a topic I touched on earlier in the summer. His instinct is similar to mine that the semantics of the verbal system are similar in prose and poetry, but this is obscured by the fact that narrative convention “tips” the reader to the correct form through the use of word order. However, Ed extends this not only to narrative preterite wayyiqtol :: poetic preterite yiqtol, but also suggests that narrative modal/habitual weqatal :: poetic modal/habitual qatal.

Also, John Hobbins has posted on the Qirbet Qeiyafa ostracon which was finally sort-of published as reported by Aren Meir. I haven’t really had time to look at it, so I don’t have much to add.

Now, back to the dissertation proposal.

(Swine?) Flu 2 – Bekins House 2

Well, both my sons have come down with the flu this past week. Henry is going on day 6 and Jack is into day 2. So far my wife and I have stayed healthy somehow, but I’m not holding my breath. My basic plan of attack has been to keep my mouth a sterile environment by always having it filled with bourbon. Surprisingly, it also makes the house seem much less stressful.

Happy birthday Henry

5 years ago today, my oldest son Henry was born. I still remember sitting in the hospital working on homework while my wife bounced on an exercise ball eating jello and watching Spongebob Squarepants on TV (this was before the doctor broke her water and got things moving).

The passage I was translating was Isaiah 9, and to this day verse 5 means something quite different to me then it ever did before I had children:

5 כִּי־יֶ֣לֶד יֻלַּד־לָ֗נוּ	For unto us a child is born,
בֵּ֚ן נִתַּן־לָ֔נוּ	A son is given to us.
וַתְּהִ֥י הַמִּשְׂרָ֖ה עַל־שִׁכְמ֑וֹ	And the government will be on his shoulder.
וַיִּקְרָ֨א שְׁמ֜וֹ	And they will name him:
פֶּ֠לֶא יוֹעֵץ֙ אֵ֣ל גִּבּ֔וֹר	Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
אֲבִיעַ֖ד שַׂר־שָׁלֽוֹם׃	Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Cuneiform resources

The Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire site is a great resource for introductory material in Assyriology. Besides transliterations and translations of Neo-Assyrian texts, there are good introductions to related subjects as well.

They have just added an excellent introduction to all things cuneiform, Cuneiform Revealed,  including a very helpful intro to the Akkadian language and even practice texts to read. The site is aimed at undergraduates and seems to be very accessible to the lay person (at least one having some familiarity with Semitic languages). I wish it was around when I was beginning Akkadian!

0 for August

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past month. There are several reasons for my silence, but mostly:

1) I have been having massive writer’s block trying to put together my dissertation proposal. I had a spurt at one point, but then I found another dissertation from 2000 that is most of my idea, so I had to turn in another direction. I have also not been helped by the fact that…

2) My oldest son Henry has started 1/2 day kindergarden and youth soccer this fall. My youngest stays at home with me as well, so I have two kids in the mornings and one in the afternoon which means my writing is limited to 1hr blocks which are dictated by when Jack feels like napping that particular day.

It is difficult to just turn on the creativity for that one hour. Studying for comps was a little easier since I was mostly translating or summarizing my reading, and I could usually just pick that up where I left off.