The Linguist’s Tale 51

well.
takes for granted a theoretical vocabulary whose own semantics is, in the
crucial respects, unspecified.9 Since arguments from data about polysemy
to the existence of definitions have been widely influential in linguistics,
and since the methodological issues are themselves of some significance,
I’m going to spend some time on this. Readers who are prepared to take
it on faith that such arguments don’t work are advised to skip.
The proposal is that whatever semantic field it occurs in, ‘keep’ always
means (expresses the concept) CAUSE A STATE THAT ENDURES
OVER TIME. Notice, however, that this assumption would explain the
intuitive univocality of ‘keep’ only if it’s also assumed that ‘CAUSE’,
‘STATE’, ‘TIME’, ‘ENDURE’, and the rest are themselves univocal
across semantic fields. A’s always entailing B doesn’t argue for A’s being
univocal if B means sometimes one thing and sometimes another when A
entails it. So, then, let’s consider the question whether, for example,
‘CAUSE’ is univocal in, say, ‘CAUSE THE MONEY TO BE IN
SUSAN’S POCKET’ and ‘CAUSE THE CROWD TO BE HAPPY’? My
point will be that Jackendoff is in trouble whichever answer he gives.
On the one hand, as we’ve just seen, if ‘CAUSE’ is polysemic, then
BLAH, BLAH, CAUSE, BLAH, BLAH is itself polysemic, so the
assumption that ‘keep’ always means BLAH, BLAH, CAUSE, BLAH,
BLAH doesn’t explain why ‘keep’ is intuitively univocal, and Jackendoff
looses his argument for definitions. So, suppose he opts for the other horn.
The question now arises what explains the univocality of ‘CAUSE’ across
semantic fields? There are, again, two possibilities. Jackendoff can say that
what makes ‘CAUSE’ univocal is that it has the definition BLAH, BLAH,
X, BLAH, BLAH where ‘X’ is univocal across fields. Or he can give up
and say that what makes ‘CAUSE’ univocal across fields isn’t that it has a
univocal definition but just that it always means cause.
Clearly, the first route leads to regress and is therefore not viable: if the
univocality of ‘CAUSE’ across fields is required in order to explain the
univocality of ‘keep’ across fields, and the univocality of ‘X ’ across fields
The Linguist’s Tale 51
9 Examples of this tactic are legion in the literature. Consider the following, from
Higginbotham 1994. “[T]he meanings of lexical items systematically infect grammar. For
example . . . it is a condition of object-preposing in derived nominal constructions in English
that the object be in some sense ‘affected’ in the events over which the nominal ranges: that
is why one has (1) but not (2)” (renumbered):
1. algebra’s discovery (by the Arabs)
2. *algebra’s knowledge (by the Arabs).
Note that ‘in some sense’ is doing all the work. It is what distinguishes the striking claim that
preposing is sensitive to the meanings of verbs from the rather less dramatic thought that
you can prepose with some verbs (including ‘discover’) and not with others (including
‘know’). You may suppose you have some intuitive grasp of what ‘affecting’ amounts to
here, but I think it’s an illusion. Ask yourself how much algebra was affected by its discovery?
More or less, would you say, than the light bulb was affected by Edison’s inventing it?
is required in order to explain the univocality of ‘CAUSE’ across fields,
then presumably there’s got to be a ‘Y ’ whose univocality explains the
univocality of ‘X ’ across fields. From there it’s turtles all the way up.
But the second route is equally embarrassing since it tacitly admits that
you don’t, after all, need to assume that a word (/concept) has a definition
in order to explain its being univocal across semantic fields; ‘CAUSE’
would be a case to the contrary. But if that is admitted, then how does the
fact that ‘keep’ is univocal across semantic fields argue that ‘keep’ has a
definition? Why not just say that ‘keep’ is univocal because it always means
keep; just as, in order to avoid the regress, Jackendoff is required to say that
‘CAUSE’ is univocal because it always means cause. Or, quite generally,
why not just say that all words are univocal across semantic fields because
semantic fields don’t affect meaning. This ‘explanation’ is, of course,
utterly empty; for all words to be univocal across semantic fields just is for
semantic fields not to affect meaning. But Jackendoff ’s ‘explanation’ is
empty too, and for the same reason. As between ‘‘keep’ is univocal because
it is field invariant’ and ‘ ‘keep’ is univocal because its definition is field
invariant’ there is, quite simply, nothing to choose.
In short: Suppose ‘CAUSE’ is ambiguous from field to field; then the
fact that ‘keep’ always entails ‘CAUSE’ is not sufficient to make ‘keep’
univocal from field to field. Well then, suppose ‘CAUSE’ is univocal from
field to field; then the fact that ‘keep’ (like ‘CAUSE’) occurs in many
different fields doesn’t explain its intuitive polysemy. Either way,
Jackendoff loses.
A recent letter from Jackendoff suggests, however, that he has yet a
third alternative in mind: “I’m not claiming”, he writes, “that keep is
univocal, nor that cause is. Rather, the semantic field feature varies among
fields, the rest remaining constant. AND THE REST IS ABSTRACT
AND CANNOT BE EXPRESSED LINGUISTICALLY, BECAUSE
YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE A FIELD FEATURE TO SAY ANYTHING”
(sic; Jackendoff ’s caps. Personal communication, 1996). This
suggestion strikes me as doubly ill-advised. In the first place, there is no
obvious reason why its being “abstract”, ineffable, and so on, should make
a concept univocal (/field invariant); why shouldn’t abstract, ineffable
concepts be polysemic, just like concrete concepts that can be effed? Unless
Jackendoff has an answer to this, he’s back in the old bind: ‘CAUSE’ is
field invariant only by stipulation. Secondly, this move leaves Jackendoff
open to a charge of seriously false advertising. For it now turns out that
‘cause a state that endures over time’ doesn’t really express the definition
of ‘keep’ after all: ‘Keep’ means something that can’t be said. A less
misleading definition than the one Jackendoff offers might thus be ‘‘keep’
means @#&$(*]’, which has the virtue of not even appearing to say
52 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
anything. The same, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of English, of course,
so lexical semantics, as Jackendoff understands it, ends in silence. The
methodological moral is, surely, Frank Ramsey’s: ‘What can’t be said can’t
be said, and it can’t be whistled either.’
I should add that Jackendoff sometimes writes as though all accounts
that agree that keeping is a kind of causing are ipso facto “notational
variants” of the definition theory. (I suppose this means that they are also
ipso facto notational variants of the non-definitional theory, since the
relation notational variant of is presumably symmetrical.) But I would have
thought that the present disagreement is not primarily about whether
keeping is a kind of causing; it’s about whether, if it is, it follows that
sentences with ‘keep’ in their surface structures have ‘CAUSE’ in their
semantic representations. This inference is, to put it mildly, not trivial since
the conclusion entails that the meaning of ‘keep’ is structurally complex,
while the premise is compatible with ‘keep’ being an atom. (By the way,
what exactly is a notational variant?)
The moral of this long polemic is, I’m afraid, actually not very
interesting. Jackendoff ’s argument that there are definitions is circular,
and circular arguments are disreputable. To the best of my knowledge, all
extant arguments that there are definitions are disreputable.
Auntie: Anyone can criticize. Nice people try to be constructive. We’ve
heard a very great deal from you of ‘I don’t like this’ and ‘I think that
won’t work’. Why don’t you tell us your theory about why ‘keep’ is
intuitively polysemic?
—: Because you won’t like it. Because you’ll say it’s silly and frivolous
and shallow.
Auntie: I think you don’t have a theory about why ‘keep’ is intuitively
polysemic.
—: Yes I do, yes I do, yes I do! Sort of.
My theory is that there is no such thing as polysemy. The appearance
that there is a problem is generated by the assumption that there are
definitions; if you take the assumption away, the problem disappears. As
they might have said in the ’60s: definitions don’t solve the problem of
polysemy; definitions are the problem of polysemy.
Auntie: I don’t understand a word of that. And I didn’t like the ’60s.
—:Well, here’s a way to put it. Jackendoff’s treatment of the difference
between, say, ‘NP kept the money’ and ‘NP kept the crowd happy’ holds
that, in some sense or other, ‘keep’ means different things in the two
sentences. There is, surely, another alternative; viz. to say that ‘keep’ means
the same thing in both—it expresses the same relation—but that, in one
case, the relation it expresses holds between NP and the crowd’s being
happy, and in the other case it holds between NP and the money. Since, on