Equatives and Deferred Reference

Previous accounts of deferred reference (e.g. Nunberg 1995) have argued that all (nonostensive) deferred reference is the result of meaning transfer, a shift in the sense of a nominal or predicate expression. An analysis of deferred equatives (I’m the pad thai) suggests an alternative account based on the notion of pragmatic mapping: a contextually licensed mapping operation between (sets of) discourse entities, neither of which undergoes a transfer of meaning. Moreover, the use of a deferred equative requires the presence of a contextually licensed open proposition whose instantiation encodes the particular mapping between entities, both of which remain accessible to varying degrees within the discourse model. Finally, it is shown how a complete account of deferred reference must provide for transfers of reference as well as sense.*

1. Introduction

One of the most creative, but least well understood, features of natural language is the possibility of deferred reference (Nunberg 1977, 1979, 1995): the metonymic use of an expression to refer to an entity related to, but not denoted by, the conventional meaning of that expression. Various types of deferred reference—and the various linguistic mechanisms available for such reference—have been identified and discussed in the literature. To illustrate the range of possibilities, consider the following (now-classic) examples of deferred reference by means of a definite description, an indexical demonstrative, a proper name, and a mass noun in 1a–d, respectively.

(1)

a. [server to co-worker in deli]

 The ham sandwich is at Table 7. (Nunberg 1995, ex. 19)

b. [restaurant patron to valet, holding up a car key]

 This is parked out back. (Nunberg 1995, ex. 1)

c. Yeats is still widely read. (Nunberg 1995, ex. 49)

d. The table is made of oak. (Nunberg 1995, ex. 24)

In 1a, the speaker’s reference is deferred in the sense that she is referring indirectly to the person who ordered the ham sandwich via the ham sandwich itself. In 1b, the speaker refers indirectly to her car by an ostensive reference to the car’s key, while in 1c the speaker is referring to the works of the poet via the poet himself. Finally, in 1d the speaker refers to a particular kind of wood via the tree from which that wood is derived. The phenomenon of deferred reference has been intensively investigated in a number of frameworks and under a variety of labels (e.g. regular polysemy (Apresjan 1974), semantic transfer rules (Leech 1974), conventionalized correspondence rules (Jackendoff 1978), metonymy (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), contextually based sense transfer (Sag 1981), active zones (Langacker 1984), lexical networks (Norvig & Lakoff 1987), lexical implication rules (Ostler & Atkins 1992), referential metonymy and predicative metonymy (Stallard 1993), connectors (Fauconnier 1994), meaning transfer (Nunberg 1995), constructional polysemy and sense extension (Copestake & Briscoe 1995), logical metonymy (Pustejovsky 1995, Verspoor 1997), enriched composition (Jackendoff 2002), inter alia).

Much less studied, however, is the possibility of deferred reference with copular sentences of the form NP-be-NP, so-called equative sentences or identity statements, as illustrated by the naturally occurring examples in 2.¹

(2)

a. [customer to server holding tray full of dinner orders at a Thai restaurant]

 I’m the pad thai. (BL, in conversation, 8/10/02)

b. Samir Abd al-Aziz al-Najim is the four of clubs. (Chicago Tribune, 4/19/03, p. 5)

c. [physician assigning interns to patients]

 You and you are shortness of breath. You and you take vertigo. And last but not least, knee pain. (ER, 4/24/03)

With the equative sentences in 2, the speaker is equating the referents of the two NPs in order to convey a particular correspondence between them. In 2a, the speaker identifies himself with his dinner order to convey indirectly that he is the person who ordered pad thai. In 2b, the reporter is identifying which playing card bears the picture of al-Najim, the former Iraqi Ba’th Party regional command chairman for East Baghdad. Finally, in 2c, the speaker, the supervisor of a hospital’s emergency room, assigns interns to patients via the symptoms displayed by the latter. In the spirit of Nunberg’s earlier work (1977...