Transfers of Meaning

'Transfers of meaning' are linguistic mechanisms that make it possible to use the same expression to refer to disjoint sorts of things. Here 1 discuss predicate transfer, an operation that takes names of properties into new names that denote properties to which they functionally correspond. It is this operation that is responsible for the new meaning of the predicate parked out back in the utterance 'I am parked out back', as well as for the lexical alternations that figure in systematic polysemy. Predicate transfer is subject to two general conditions, which require that basic and derived property stand in a functional correspondence and that the derived property should be a 'noteworthy' feature of its bearer. I argue that by appealing to predicate transfer we can maintain a very strict definition of syntactic identity, which rules out all cases of'sortal crossing', in which a term appears to refer to things of two sorts at the same time, as in examples like Ringo squeezed himself into a tight space; in such a case, the reflexive is strictly preferential with its antecedent. 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N By 'transfers of meaning' I mean the ensemble of productive linguistic processes that enable us to use the same expression to refer to what are intuitively distinct sorts of categories of things. Broadly speaking, transfers involve all the figures that traditional rhetoric describes as metaphors, synesthesias, metonymies, and synecdoches, in all their synchronic manifestations. The difference is that transfers are linguistic processes, whereas the rhetorical figures are defined and classified according to the independent conceptual relations that they exploit. The difference between metaphors and metonymies, for example, is that the first presupposes a resemblance and the second a contiguity. And we can go on to classify figures according to the particular conceptual schemas they rest on, either as general correspondences like 'abstract for concrete', 'part for whole', and 'animate for inanimate', or as more specific schemas like 'life is a journey' or 'polities are bodies'. But taken by themselves, these schemas and principles aren't sufficient to explain the linguistic phenomena of transfer. Granted that there is a salient correspondence between monarchs and crowns, for example, it still has to be explained why the word croum can be used to refer to monarchs—or for that matter why this fact n o Transfers of Meaning should have any linguistic consequences at all. For this we have to look to specifically linguistic mechanisms, which is what I will be talking about here. These mechanisms exist in the service of the expression of conceptual regularities, but they are in principle independent of them, and are constrained in ways that don't permit a purely pragmatic explanation. They are the linguistic handmaidens of figuration, but each is specialized in her offices. 2 MECHANISMS OF TRANSFER The easiest way to appreciate the difference between rhetorical figures and the linguistic mechanisms is to consider how we can exploit the same sorts of correspondences among things in the world to effect two different kinds of transfer. A customer hands his key to an attendant at a parking lot and says either (i) or (2): 1. This is parked out back. 2. I am parked out back. Both these utterances involve metonymies. In (1), for example, we would be inclined to say that the subject refers not to the key that the speaker is holding, but to the car that the key goes with. And in fact all the linguistic evidence supports this analysis. For example, the number of the demonstrative is determined by the intended referent, not the demonstratum. So even if the customer is holding up several keys that fit a single car, he would say 'This is parked out back', whereas if he's holding up a single key that fits several cars, he would say, 'These are parked out back'. We can make the same point looking at languages that mark demonstratives and adjectives for grammatical gender. In Italian, for example, the word for key is feminine, la chiave, and the word for truck is masculine, il camion. And if a customer gives the attendant the key to a truck it will be the referent, not the demonstratum, that determines the gender of the demonstrative and the adjective for 'parked', as in (3): 3. Holding up a key (la chiave, fern, sg.) to refer to a truck (il camion, masc.) Questo (masc. sg.) e parcheggiato (masc. sg.) in dietro. 'This (masc.) is parked (masc.) in back.' One final example to the same effect: we can conjoin another predicate that describes the car, but not a predicate that describes the key: 4. This is parked out back and may not start. 5. ??This fits only the left front door and is parked out back. So there's every reason for saying that the subject of sentences like these refers to the car. Geoffrey Nunberg 111 But what of an utterance like (2), 'I'm parked out back'? This too is plainly a metonymy of some sort, and there may be a temptation to analyze it as we would (1), saying that the subject of the sentence refers not to the speaker, but to the speaker's car. But the tests we have used to validate this analysis for the demonstrative in (1) give a different answer here. For example, if the speaker has two cars he wouldn't say: 6. We are parked out back. (though of course this would be an appropriate utterance if there were two people who were waiting for the car). By the same token, an Italian man who was waiting for his car would express this by using a masculine adjective parcheggiato for 'parked', even though the word for 'car' is feminine, la macchina. 7. Io sono parcheggiato (*parcheggiata, fern, sg.) dietro. And in this case, we can conjoin any other predicate that describes the speaker, but not always the one that describes the car: 8. I am parked out back and have been waiting for 15 minutes. 9. *I am parked out back and may not start. The conclusion is that the subject of (1) refers to the speaker, and the transfer involves the predicate. That is, the predicate parked out back contributes a property of persons, the property they possess in virtue of the locations of their cars. Now the difference between these examples clearly doesn't have anything to do with the kind of relations they exploit. In both cases we assume a correspondence between the things in one domain, the cars parked in various locations, and the things in another domain, keys or drivers as the case may be. But we can take semantic advantage of these correspondences in two different ways. Sentence (1) is a case of deferred ostension or deferred indexical reference, a process that allows a demonstrative or indexical to refer to an object that correspond in a certain way to the contextual element picked out by a demonstration or by the semantic character of the expression. In this connection, note that we can't get this kind of deferred reading when we use a description in place of a demonstrative, as in (10): 10. *The key I'm holding is parked out back. Whereas (2) exemplifies another kind of transfer process, which I'll call predicate transfer. The principle here is that the name of a property that applies to something in one domain can sometimes be used as the name of a property that applies to things in another domain, provided the two properties correspond in a certain way. And just to fill out the contrast here, note that unlike deferred ostension, predicate transfer is indifferent to how the bearer i i2 Transfers of Meaning of this new or derived property is referred to—by an indexical or description or whatever. For example, in this situation the parking lot manager could say to the attendant: 11. The man with the cigar (Mr. McDowell, etc.) is parked out back. What these examples show, then, is that unlike rhetorical classifications like metaphor and metonymy, the various mechanisms of transfer can't be distinguished simply by pointing at the types of correspondences they exploit. And for this reason the description of these mechanisms is fundamentally a linguistic problem, rather than a problem of conceptual analysis. That is, there is nothing we can learn about keys, drivers, or cars that will help us to explain the differences between examples like (i) and (2). In the rest of this paper I will be concentrating on just one of these mechanisms, predicate transfer. In this section I will schematize the conditions that license this operation. In the following sections I will spell out the role of predicate transfer in lexical polysemy, and then discuss its implication for some well-known syntactic puzzles. Finally, I will talk about some of the methodological difficulties that predicate transfer raises. 3 CONDITIONS ON PREDICATE TRANSFER Predicate transfer is subject to two conditions. The first of these I have already mentioned: the property denoted by the derived predicate has to correspond in a certain way to the property denoted by the original predicate. With an utterance like (2), for example, we begin with a functional correspondence between the locations of cars in a lot and the properties of the owners, or, more accurately, the 'havers', of these cars. When two property domains correspond in an interesting or useful way—of which more in a moment—we can schematize the operation of predicate transfer as follows: 12. Condition on predicate transfer Let & and &' be sets of properties that are related by a salient transfer function gt: & — &' Then if F is a predicate that denotes a property P e 0>, diere is also a predicate F', spelt like F, that denotes the property P', where P' gt(P). 6 In the cases we have been talking about, of course, these correspondences between properties are mediated by correspondences between their bearers— e.g. the functional relation from cars to their owners—and we might want to represent this directly. So let h be a salient function from a set of things A to another (disjoint) set of things B. Then for any predicate F t