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.

More evidence of the Kaufman effect?

Duane Smith recently posted a link to an interesting discussion of the order of פ and ע in the acrostics in Lamentations (איכה). The issue is that in the acrostics in chapters 2-4 the פ section precedes ע. The author, Mitchell First, argues that this is because פ actually preceded ע in the alphabet in the period of the Judges and First Temple. Interestingly, in the Qumran documents, the פ verse precedes ע in the first chapter as well:

(4Q111 3:7) • פרשה {{°°}}  ציון בי֯[דיה 

אין] (4Q111 3:8) מנחם לה מכול אוהביה 

צדיק אתה יהוה 

צפה אדוני ליעקוב 

סביב[יו צריו] 

(4Q111 3:9) היתה ציוׄן לנדוח בניהמהׄ.

 (4Q111 3:9) • על אלה בכו֯ 

עיני ירדה דמעתי 

כיא רחקׄ[ ממני] (4Q111 3:10) מ֯[נחם 

משיב ]נפש 

היו בני֯ שוממים

[ כיא ]גׄבר אויב.

 

Now, the Kaufman effect is the idea that in a frequently copied text, the end of the text seems to have fewer scribal improvements than its beginning. This is based on the fact that people are lazy. We put a lot of effort into the beginning of our work, but by the end we just copy. Hence, it is not surprising that the alphabetic order would be “corrected” in chapter 1, but left alone in the following chapters. 

Tense-switching in LBH

In my previous series of posts, one of my hesitations in applying tense-switching to biblical poetry was the assumption that the syntax of biblical narrative and poetry are somehow “synchronic”. The Hebrew found roughly in Genesis-Kings is referred to as Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH) or Standard Biblical Hebrew (SBH) and is generally assumed to be a formal literary southern urban (most likely Jerusalem) dialect. This is certainly not proven beyond a doubt, but while other  dialects may creep in depending upon the source of the text or the purpose of the author, the dialect across these books seems highly standardized. One of the standard features is the consistent use of verbal morphology combined with word order, what Niccacci terms tense-switching, to indicate tense/aspect and prominence.

Even within SBH, the system begins to break down a bit as we move from narrative proper to direct speech, but what happens when we move completely away from SBH to another dialect, such as Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH)? Jan Joosten has a helpful article (“The Disappearance of Iterative WEQATAL in the Biblical Hebrew Verbal system,” Pages 135 – 147 in Biblical Hebrew in its Northwest Semitic Setting, Eisenbrauns, 2006) in which he argues that, while still used as a future/modal, the past iterative function of weqatal has all but disappeared in LBH and is being replaced by weyiqtol. 

For instance, notice the chain of weyiqtols in 2 Chr 24:11 where we would expect weqatal:

2Chr 24:11 וַיְהִ֡י בְּעֵת֩ יָבִ֨יא אֶת־הָֽאָר֜וֹן אֶל־פְּקֻדַּ֣ת הַמֶּלֶךְ֮ בְּיַ֣ד הַלְוִיִּם֒ וְכִרְאוֹתָ֞ם כִּי־רַ֣ב הַכֶּ֗סֶף וּבָ֨א סוֹפֵ֤ר הַמֶּ֙לֶךְ֙ וּפְקִיד֙ כֹּהֵ֣ן הָרֹ֔אשׁ וִיעָ֙רוּ֙ אֶת־הָ֣אָר֔וֹן וְיִשָּׂאֻ֖הוּ וִֽישִׁיבֻ֣הוּ אֶל־מְקֹמ֑וֹ כֹּ֤ה עָשׂוּ֙ לְי֣וֹם ׀ בְּי֔וֹם וַיַּֽאַסְפוּ־כֶ֖סֶף לָרֹֽב׃12 וַיִּתְּנֵ֨הוּ הַמֶּ֜לֶךְ וִֽיהוֹיָדָ֗ע אֶל־עוֹשֵׂה֙ מְלֶ֙אכֶת֙ עֲבוֹדַ֣ת בֵּית־יְהוָ֔ה 

11 And when the chest would be brought to the king’s officers by the Levites, when they saw that there was much money in it, the king’s secretary and the officer of the chief priest would come and would empty the chest (weyiqtol) and would take it (weyiqtol) and would return it (weyiqtol) to its place. Thus they did day after day, and they collected money in abundance. 12 And the king and Jehoiada gave it to those who had charge of the work of the house of the LORD…

Joosten notes that it is possible that these are wayyiqtol’s which have been mispointed, since in Kings we do have examples of weqatal followed by wayyiqtol as an iterative (in fact, such a construction is in the similar account in 2 Kg 12:11). However, usually the Masoretes mistakenly point weyiqtol as wayyiqtol, not the other way around. Further, the abundance of examples of weyiqtol as an iterative in LBH texts supports the pointing of the MT. 

This change seems to be part of a larger realignment of the verbal system as it moves toward Mishnaic Hebrew. The wayyiqtol form is gradually falling out of use, and if we look forward to the Isaiah Scroll from Qumran we see that the scribe consistently replaced wayyiqtol with a qatal form. Note also that the Isaiah scroll replaces iterative weqatal with weyiqtol. In LBH narrative, we already see weqatal (ie conjunctive waw + clause initial qatal) as a non-iterative past tense.  This is the normal narrative tense in Official Aramaic, which already dropped the wayyiqtol, and will become the narrative tense in Mishnaic Hebrew. For example, take Ezra 3:10:

Ezra 3:10 וְיִסְּד֥וּ הַבֹּנִ֖ים אֶת־הֵיכַ֣ל יְהוָ֑ה…

10 And the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord 

I think we can pull a few things from this. First, wayyiqtol is the special case. Most likely, the preterite was used clause initially in narrative contexts because this position is iconic for sequence, but it then became a frozen form so that the waw was reinterpreted as part of the verb, thus it is proper to speak of wayyiqtol as a verbal form. Obviously, there is no possibility of a non-clause-initial wayyiqtol. 

However, to speak of weqatal, x-qatal, weyiqtol, and x-yiqtol is to combine (and perhaps confuse) the semantics of the verbal morphology with the pragmatics of word-order. Here I agree with John Cook that wayyiqtol and weqatal should be seen as two separate things. The past iterative use of weqatal flows from the modality of the perfect, just as the past iterative use of x-yiqtol flows from the modality of yiqtol. Hence there is no problem with an iterative weyiqtol. The word-order has to do with whether the verbs are sequential or not. Both weqatal and weyiqtol are clause initial, thus iconic for sequence (note that I’m not saying marked for sequence). It seems to me that there is no reason why the classical dialect could not have used weyiqtol for foregrounded iterative action, it just chose weqatal as the standard form. This gives a nice symmetry to the system since x-yiqtol is used as past iterative in non-sequential circumstances, while x-qatal is reserved for circumstantial clauses. However, once the simple past use of weqatal begins to encroach, it makes sense to move to weyiqtol instead.

So, we see that the system of tense-switching doesn’t quite hold for LBH. It is not unreasonable to assume that similar differences would be found in dialects that differ geographically from SBH as well. For instance, northern dialects may be more influenced by Aramaic which did not use weqatal as an iterative either. Thus, while I agree that the syntax of poetry should not differ greatly from that of prose, we cannot assume that SBH is necessarily the prose dialect we should be using as a baseline reference.

OK, I swear I’m done with Niccacci now. Really.