Journal of Pragmatics 19 (1993) 487-501

North-Holland

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Book reviews

Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu, On the methodology of linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. vi + 186 pp. & 32.50.

Reviewed by Yan Huang*

Despite its title, the book under review is mainly concerned with the treatment of anaphora (or coreference, as Hintikka and Sandu call it) in Chomsky’s Government-Binding Theory (GB) and Hintikka’s Game-Theo- retical Semantics (GTS). The contents of the 11 chapters are as set out below. Chapter 1 discusses general theoretical and methodological issues (paradigma- tic solutions vs. empirical generalizations, explanatory practice vs. philosophi- cal preconceptions, the commensurability of different theories, types of multi- level explanations, etc.). Chapter 2 presents an outline of the central tenets of GTS. Chapter 3 takes on the issue of the ‘Galilean’ style of inquiry in GB, focusing on the Binding Theory expounded in Chomsky (1986). Chapter 4 and chapter 5 compare the explanatory mechanisms of GB and GTS. Chap- ter 6 considers the role of thematic relations in GB, arguing that the concept of thematic relations can be dispensed with in GTS. Chapter 7 discusses the GTS treatment of anaphora in relation to ‘donkey sentences’, conditionals and bound anaphors. Chapter 8 and chapter 9 provide a more detailed GTS analysis of simple and complex ‘donkey sentences’ respectively. Chapter 10 reviews a number of recent syntactic and semantic theories of bound ana- phors, including Kamp (1982), Reinhart (1983), May (1985) and Hornstein (1986). Finally, Chapter 11 looks at reflexivization - especially reflexive/pro- noun alternations in locative PPs - in English.

The book is a welcome contribution to the current, ongoing debate about the ‘division of labour’ between grammar and pragmatics regarding anaphora (e.g. Levinson 1987, 1991, Kempson 1988, Ariel 1990, Huang 1991a). The main merit of the book is that it provides additional, compelling semantic evidence for the argument that anaphora is basically a semantic/pragmatic, as opposed to a syntactic, phenomenon and consequently it cannot be ade- quately dealt with by a syntax-driven theory such as GB (e.g. pp. 8, 97, 98, 116, 130, 131, 165; see also the works referred to above). Moreover, the book

* Correspondence lo: Y. Huang, Faculty of English, Somerville College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6HD, UK.

488 Book reviews

offers a number of thought-provoking ideas. For example, the authors’ discussion of bound anaphors used in ‘donkey sentences’ (1) (p. 115) inverse- linking sentences (2) (p. 140) and Bach-Peters sentences (3) (p. 140) has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt the need for a richer and more sophisticated conception of logical form than is currently assumed in linguistic theory.

(1) If Peter owns a donkey, he beats it. (2) Every daughter of every professor in some small college town wishes that

she could leave it. (3) Every pilot who shot at it hit some MIG that chased him.

The major disappointment of the book, however, is the inadequacy of the GTS model Hintikka and Sandu have proposed for the analysis of anaphora. While I sympathize with the authors’ aims, I find it hard to accept their repeated claim that ‘GTS provides the first real theory of coreference’ (original emphasis) (p. 107). (I imagine that a GB syntactician would be more irritated than I am by the overall tone of the book.) To see this, let us consider three sample cases: (i) splitting phrases, (ii) control and (iii) reflexive/pronoun alternations in locative PPs.

Splitting phrases We begin with what Hintikka and Sandu call splitting phrases, as in (4)

(P. 67).

(4a) Tom and Dick admired each other’s gift to him. (4b) Tom and Dick admired each other’s gift to himself. (4~) Tom and Dick admired each other’s gift to them. (4d) *Tom and Dick admired each other’s gift to themselves.

In GTS, anaphora is in general handled by means of lexical rules, i.e. rules for semantic games induced by non-logical lexical items. These rules determine coreferentiality, or lack thereof, between two NPs in a sentence on the basis of the logical form they have spelt out step by step for the sentence. Thus, given the semantic game rule (G. each other), (4a-d) are translated into (5a-d)

(P. 69).

(5a) Tom admired Dick’s gift to him, and Dick admired Tom’s gift to him. (5b) Tom admired Dick’s gift to himself, and Dick admired Tom’s gift to

himself. (5~) Tom admired Dick’s gift to them, and Dick admired Tom’s gift to them. (5d) Tom admired Dick’s gift to themselves, and Dick admired Tom’s gift to

themselves.

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(5a-d) are then dealt with by the semantic game rule (G. genitive), their conjuncts having been split up. The application of this rule will then turn the first conjunct of (5a-d) into (6ad) (p. 69).

(6a) Tom admired g, and g is a gift by Dick to him. (6b) Tom admired g, and g is a gift by Dick to himself. (6~) Tom admired g, and g is a gift by Dick to them. (6d) *Tom admired g, and g is a gift by Dick to themselves.

By the same rule, one obtains (7a-d) for the second conjunct of (5a-d).

(7a) Dick admired g’, and g’ is a gift by Tom to him. (7b) Dick admired g’, and g’ is a gift by Tom to himself. (7~) Dick admired g’, and g’ is a gift by Tom to them. (7d) *Dick admired g’, and g’ is a gift by Tom to themselves.

Taken jointly, (6) and (7) will give a correct account of (4). While this approach provides an elegant analysis of examples like (4), it seems to leave examples like (8) (p. 80) quite mysterious as far as I have been able to ascertain.

(8) Tom and Dick promised each other to shave themselves.

In order to account for examples like (8), Hintikka and Sandu have to stipulate that the same semantic game rule (G. each other) would transform (8) into (9) rather than (lo), as would be expected (p. 80).

(9) Tom promised Dick to shave himself, and Dick promised Tom to shave himself.

(10) Tom promised Dick to shave themselves, and Dick promised Tom to

shave themselves.

This stipulation, of course, would yield the desired result. But its ad hoc nature is obvious here; it has little predictive or explanatory power.

Control

Next, we move onto a GTS treatment of control.

(11) John persuaded Mary to read English at Oxford.

Now, given the semantic game rule (G. persuade to), (11) is assigned the ‘Davidsonic’ logical form (12) which predicts correctly that (11) take object control.

490 Book reviews

(12) (John persuaded Mary that:) Mary reads English at Oxford.

Serious difficulties, however, would arise with this analysis in relation to control verbs that can be used to express different speech acts.

(13) (Chinese, Huang 1991b) Yisheng shuofii bingrtn mingtian gei ta kaidao. doctor persuade patient tomorrow for 3SG operate ‘The surgeon persuades the patient to operate on him tomorrow.’

(14) (German, Comrie 1984) Helga versprachotto, noch einmal einen Sieg zu erleben. Helga promised Otto once again a victory to experience ‘Helga promised Otto to experience victory once again.’

(15) (Farkas 1988) The pupil asked the teacher to leave early.

For many speakers of Chinese, German and English, (13) (14) and (15) are ambiguous: they can take either subject or object control. Moreover, whether the subject or the object control reading is the preferred interpretation depends largely on the speech act the verb performs, the context, and the real world possibilities and probabilities. But this fact cannot be accommodated by Hintikka and Sandu’s analysis of control, since the semantic game rules for control verbs (in their present form) are formulated in such a way as to allow only either subject or object control.

Here it may also be mentioned that the GTS account has nothing to say about exceptions to Bach’s Generalization (that a direct object controller cannot be omitted), as in (l6)-( 18).

(16) John signaled to leave. (17) (Russian, Comrie 1984)

Predsedatel’ poprosil vojti v komnatu. chairman asked enter into room ‘The chairman asked (someone) to enter the room.’

(18) (Guugu Yimidhirr, Levinson 1987) Muuni nyulu gurray gaari milgamul madhi-nhu. Muuni he-NOM told NEG ear-PRIV V’IZER-PURP ‘Muuni told (them) not to be disobedient.’

Nor does this analysis seem to have an explanation for exceptions to Visser’s Generalization (that subject-control verbs do not passivize), either. For example, it is incapable of accounting for the switch of control in double- passive constructions, first noted by Hurst and Brame more than fifteen years ago. (For a recent semantic/pragmatic attempt to accommodate these well-

Book reviews 491

known counterexamples to Bach’s Generalization and Visser’s Generalization within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), see Sag and Polland 199 1.)

(19) Bill was promised to be allowed to leave. (20) (German, RBiiEka 1983)

ihm war versprochen worden in die him-DAT (it) had been promised into the

Nationalmannschaft aufgenommen zu werden national team included to be ‘He had been promised to be included on the national team.’

(21) (Czech, RiiiiEka 1983) bylo mu slibeno bjlt zafazen do vybranlho muistva (it) was him-DAT promised to be included into select team

‘He was promised to be included on the select team.’

Clearly, one of the crucial features of any adequate theory of control is an exploration of where lexical semantics fails to make correct predictions and where pragmatics takes over. Hintikka and Sandu have skipped over the important role played by pragmatics in regulating control relations, and consequently their account is rendered just as good (and as bad) as any other semantic analysis of control within the framework of GB. (For a neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of control in Chinese, see Huang 1991 b.)

Reflexive/pronoun alternations in PPs Finally, we come to reflexive/pronoun alternations in locative PPs in English. Consider (22) first (p. 64). (The acceptability judgements are the authors’.)

(22a) Tom saw Dick near him. (22b) *Tom saw Dick near himself.

On the GTS theory, prepositions are subject to a semantic game rule (G. preposition). Applying (G. near) to (22), one obtains (23) (p. 65).

(23a) Tom saw Dick on the lawn. The lawn was near him. (23b) *Tom saw Dick on the lawn. The lawn was near himself.

Then by the semantic game rule (G. he), also dubbed the Exclusion Principle (p. 30), which states that clausemate expressions, other than reflexives, must not have the same value, it is correctly predicted that him and Tom can be coreferential in (22a). The ungrammaticality of (22b), on the other hand, is accounted for in terms of a semantic game rule (G. himself), which in effect rules out the possibility that a reflexive can be coreferential with a non-

492 Book review

clausemate NP. So far the analysis seems flawless, however, when one comes to examples like (24) (p. 174), it becomes problematic.

(24a) Susan put the blanket under her. (24b) Susan put the blanket under herself.

Now, given the semantic game rule for reflexives, (24b) would be wrongly predicted to be ungrammatical, because Susan and herself occur in different clauses. (In fact, the same rule would also wrongly eliminate ‘long-distance reflexivization’ in a wide variety of genetically and structurally different languages. For various recent GB accounts of long-distance reflexivization, see Koster and Reuland 1991.) As an initial attempt to explain away these counterexamples, Hintikka and Sandu have to invoke ad hoc notions such as perspective vs. descriptive identification. But this seems to pose some prob- lems for the GTS framework. In fact, the reflexive/pronoun alternation in (24) can be readily accounted for in terms of a neo-Gricean pragmatic theory. Intuitively, the use of the reflexive in (24b) seems to indicate some kind of unexpectedness. Examined in a more careful way, this unexpectedness may turn out to be logophoricity (roughly, the non-deictic, subjective point of view of the antecedent/referent), emphaticness/contrastiveness, or something yet to be discovered. But whatever it may turn out to be, it can be given a statisfactory explanation via a neo-Gricean pragmatic principle of Manner; it is because the use of a reflexive can convey a message which could not be conveyed by the use of a pronoun that a reflexive is chosen in (24b) (Huang 1991a). This seems to indicate that problems of this sort are more amenable to explanations in pragmatics than in semantics.

In summary, Hintikka and Sandu’s book clearly brings us closer to understanding the problem of anaphora; however, its weakness shows us where much work remains to be done.

References

Ariel, Mira, 1990. Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. London: Routledge. Chomsky, Noam, 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin and use. New York: Praeger. Comrie, Bernard, 1984. Subject and object control: Syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Proceedings of

the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 10: 450464. Farkas, Donka, 1988. On obligatory control. Linguistics and Phiolosophy I I : 27758.

Hornstein, Norbert, 1986. Logic as grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huang, Yan, 1991a. A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 27: 301-335.

Huang, Yan, 1991b. A pragmatic analysis of control in Chinese. In: Jef Verschueren. ed.. 1991, Levels of linguistic adaptation, 113-145. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Kamp, Hans, 1982. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In: J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen and M. Stokhof, eds., 1982, Formal methods in the study of languages, 2777321. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum.

Book reviews 493

Kempson, Ruth, 1988. Logical form: The grammar cognition interface. Journal of Linguistics

24: 393-341. Koster, Jan and Eric Reuland, eds., 1991. Long-distance anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. Levinson, Stephen, C., 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic

reduction of Binding and Control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics 23: 379433. Levinson, Stephen, C., 1991. Pragmatic reduction of the Binding Conditions revisited. Journal of

Linguistics 27: 107-161.

May, Robert, 1985. Logical form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reinhart, Tanya, 1983. Anaphora and semantic interpretation. London: Croom Helm. RbiiEka, Rudolf, 1983. Remarks on control. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 309-324.

Sag, Ivan A. and Carl Pollard, 1991. An integrated theory of complement control. Language 67: 63-l 13.

Mark Richard, Propositional attitudes: An essay on thoughts and how we ascribe them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ix + 275 pp. f. 27.50.

Reviewed by Malgorzata Wieczorek*

I. Introduction

The book under review addresses topics in both the philosophy of mind and of language. The author studies the way we talk about propositional attitudes such as believing, saying, knowing, etc. and what makes sentences containing a that-clause (henceforth, t-clause) true or false in a particular context. In other words, the relation between a context and those sentences which constitute the speaker’s thoughts in the context is examined.

2. Structure of proposition, semantic and psychological sententialism

Richard assumes that “propositions named by t-clauses of English have a structure more or less like that of sentences of English” (p. 18). Having introduced this assumption, the author also presupposes its converse to be true, i.e. that the structure of propositions resembles the syntactic structure of t-clauses. In order to gain support for both these issues, he adopts Cresswell’s view (1985) that propositions expressed by a t-clause are structured intensions related to the set of worlds in which the content of a t-clause sentence is true. Cresswell’s view is somewhat controversial, yet the author notes that it offers a compromise between the view that “t-clauses name wholly unstructured entities like sets of worlds and the view that they name entities with the exact

* Correspondence to: M. Wieczorek, Henri Dunantstraat 157, NL-1443 CD Purmerend, The Netherlands.