Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction By John A. Hawkins (review)

REVIEWS191 -----. 1976. Language diffusion on the Asian continent: Problems oftypological diversity in Sino-Tibetan. Computational Analyses of Asian & African Languages 3.49-65. -----. 1976-77. A comparative study of the Chin dialect of Chinese, 1-3. Journal of Asian and African Studies 12.11-58, 13.77-127, 14.72-132. -----. 1978. hP'ags-pa Chinese. (Language and writing reference materials, 1.) Tokyo: Ministry of Education Special Research Project. Hashimoto, Oi-kan Y. 1972. Phonology of Cantonese. (Studies in Yue dialects, 1.) Cambridge: University Press. Ting, Pang-hsin. 1978. A note on tone change in the Ch'ao-chou dialect. Paper delivered to the 12th Annual Meeting, International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Language Studies and Linguistics, Tucson. To appear in the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sínica. Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing changes as a cause of residue. Lg. 45.9-25. -----. 1979. Language change: A lexical perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology 8.353-71. Yu, Chang-kyun. 1973. Abbreviated Chinese rimes in the Mongolian script. San Francisco & Taipei: Chinese Materials & Research Aids Service Center. [Received 25 April 1980.] Definiteness and indefiniteness: A study in reference and grammaticality prediction . By John A. Hawkins. London: Croom Helm; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978. Pp. 316. $21.50. Reviewed by Noel Burton-Roberts, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Hawkins here offers a unified account of the English articles—unified in the sense of combining a semantic (truth-conditional) with a pragmatic (appropriateness , speech-act) approach. More generally, however, his discussion is intended as a contribution to the syntax/semantics debate, particularly the first two chapters. Thus Chap. 1, 'Meaning and grammaticality prediction in generative grammar' (20-42), reviews the controversy from 1957 onwards, while Chap. 2, 'Syntactic and semantic causes ofungrammaticality' (43-85), presents some fairly detailed discussion and exemplification of types of rule incompatibility ; much of this assumes the framework and formulation of Burt 1971. H favors a 'generative semantics' position, on the grounds that some ungrammaticalities arise through the application of incompatible rules, while some rule incompatibilities can be shown to arise through the sensitivity of the rules involved to a semantic incompatibility. He further cites Seuren's (1972) arguments that the Katz-Postal Hypothesis ultimately entails the abandonment of an independent semantic component, and hence the abandonment of the Aspects model (which conformed to the KPH and had a semantic component) in favor of a full-fledged 'semantic syntax'. Chap. 3, 'The referential meaning of definiteness' (86-171), and Chap. 4, 'The semantic contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness' (172-227), present H's semantico-pragmatic account of the English definite and indefinite articles in terms of a single semantic opposition, inclusive vs. exclusive reference. Chap. 5, 'Ungrammaticalities arising from the semantic contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness' (228-79), and Chap. 6, 'Conclusions and hypotheses for the theory ofgrammar' 192LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) (280-303), link the discussion of Chaps. 1-2 with that of Chaps. 3-4. Here H demonstrates that the underlying semantic polarity of inclusive and exclusive reference is required in the explanation of several ungrammaticalities involving articles. Apart from H's wishing to invoke the semantic contrast in grammaticality predictions involving articles (a goal with which I am broadly in sympathy), he does not discuss the full implications for grammatical description of his theoretical position (indeed, the full implications are not strictly relevant to his specific purpose); nor does he give any general formulation of the rules he envisages. In the absence of any such discussion, one could well imagine the theoretical background to the discussion ofthe English articles to be something not unlike Chomsky's Aspects—so that, in this context, the question of the validity of Seuren's argument is largely academic. More stimulating, however, is H's discussion of the articles themselves. He criticizes earlier treatments of definite and indefinite (e.g. Russell, Strawson, Searle, Christopherson, and some TG accounts) as being partial: wholly pragmatic, wholly logical, or wholly syntactic. He seeks to remedy this. The central and most interesting feature of his account is the rejection ofthe opposition ofunique/non-unique reference, and its replacement with inclusive/exclusive reference. It is on this feature...