So let’s talk about identity.
Most of our conversation time is spent chatting about people, but the individuals we talk
about aren’t always around.
They might not even be people we know!
Thankfully, language is up to the task, with handy words like “she” and “them,”
to help us keep track of who’s who.
And while this cast of linguistic characters might seem too small for the job, pronouns
play a wide range of parts from one sentence to the next, although the roles they take
on aren’t without limits.
Let’s take a closer look at just how versatile pronouns really are.
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
In our episode on relative clauses, we mentioned that one way to think about pronouns like
“he” and “they” is as variables, like the x’s and y’s you see in math.
That’s because they don’t have a fixed value — the people they point to can change
from one use to the next.
But their behaviour can get a little tricky, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether
this idea actually holds up.
Personal pronouns like “I” and “you” seem easy enough.
They generally pick out either the person communicating or their audience.
And while we’ll have more to say about them in the future, we’ll focus on third person
pronouns for now, since they give us plenty to talk about by themselves.
In fact, let’s go ahead and start with pronouns like “themselves”: reflexives!
We’ve mentioned before that reflexive pronouns in sentences like “Sarah saw herself in
Beth” are pretty restricted: they always have to point to some other part of their
own clause.
When they try pointing to someone outside their clause, we get sentences like “Sarah
saw that Arthur was trying to help herself”, which just doesn’t work, assuming you want
“herself” to jump over “Arthur” and get to “Sarah.”
So, it looks like reflexive pronouns always connect up to some nearby noun phrase, which
we’ll call their antecedent.
As long as the sentence is put together in the right way, reflexives end up being referential;
they pick out exactly the same individual their antecedent does.
In other words, the two of them co-refer.
But this can’t be quite how it works, at least not all the time.
Take the sentence “Everybody thought of themselves as unique.”
Here, it’s not like the group is collectively thinking of itself as unique.
Instead, each individual member thinks they’re unique, so the sentence means something more
like “For every individual x, x thinks x is unique.”
The reflexive pronoun doesn’t seem to be pointing to “everybody” as a whole, here,
like it did with “Sarah” in our first example.
So just how do these meanings come about?
Well, it turns out that our theory about how sentences are built up can already explain
everything we’ve just seen — we only have to put the pieces together in the right order.
The first step is to understand that when a reflexive pronoun points to another part
of the sentence it’s in, it’s not so much that those two parts of the sentence both
refer to the same thing — it’s more like they’ve been painted the same colour.
Linguists call this kind of labelling co-indexation, and usually represent it with subscripts,
like this.
This way, we capture the connection between the different parts of the sentence, without
claiming they pick out exactly the same thing in the world, which as we saw with the “everybody”
sentence doesn’t really work.
The next step, then, is to understand where each of our variables come from, and how they
all end up the same shape.
For instance, we summarized the meaning of “Everybody thought of themselves as unique”
as “For every individual x, x thinks x is unique.”
But that has three x’s in it!
So, the question is, how’d they all get there?
Well, that first “x” is just built into the meaning of quantifying words like “everybody”
and “nobody.”
It signals the way these words connect up with others to form complete sentences.
And that last “x” is how we interpret our pronoun.
But what about that “x” in the middle?
What word does that come from?
And how do we guarantee that it’s also an “x” and not a “y” or a “z,” to
make sure we get a match that gives us the reflexive meaning we want?
That’s where our second ingredient comes in.
In the past, we’ve argued that the subjects of sentences actually start off much closer
to the verb than they appear, and then move up front later on, when everything’s pronounced.
This is easiest to see in sentences like “All of Sarah’s sisters haven’t been cured
yet,” which has a couple of subtly different meanings.
Either the subject can be interpreted where it started off, under “not,” in which
case not all of Sarah’s sisters were cured; or it’s interpreted higher up, meaning that
none of them were.
Assuming this kind of movement happens generally, then it also shows up in sentences like “Everybody
thought of themselves as unique.”
And this gives us the missing variable we’ve been looking for.
When the subject “everybody” moves up and out of the verb phrase, it leaves behind
a silent trace, which gets interpreted much like a pronoun does — that is, like a variable.
Since our sentence started off with “everybody” being co-indexed with “themselves,” meaning
they’d been painted the same metaphorical colour, the trace that gets left behind by
“everybody” winds up that colour too.
The trace and the pronoun are inextricably bound together.
All this means that the reflexive meanings that pronouns like “himself” and “herself”
receive actually come for free from our existing rules.
So it follows that our original idea of treating reflexive pronouns as variables works after all.
And we don’t even need to say anything special about our earlier examples, either.
In “Sarah saw herself in Beth,” the subject moves out of the verb phrase, much like “everybody”
did before.
Then, applying the same rules, the variable “herself” gets bound to the trace left
behind by Sarah, producing the right result.
So our reflexive-pronouns-as-variables idea seems to fit nicely into our existing theory.
But can the same be said for regular pronouns?
Sometimes they seem to behave similarly, as in “Ira was worried he was sick.”
Out of the blue, the most obvious interpretation is that Ira was worried that Ira was sick.
So, sentences like this one can get the same ‘bound variable’ interpretation as our
other examples.
But non-reflexive pronouns are generally less restricted than their reflexive sisters, and
so the sentence has another meaning, where Ira is worried that someone else is sick.
Instead of being bound to some other part of the sentence, the pronoun “he” has
the power to freely pick out whoever else is being talked about.
So does this mean that reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns are fundamentally different?
Not necessarily.
In logic, statements can actually make use of two different kinds of variables: bound and free.
If we represented in symbols the sentence “Everyone who works at the Dyad Institute
looks out for themselves,” it would look something like this.
"For all people x, if x works for Dyad, then x looks out for x.”
Here, every occurrence of the variable “x” in that statement is bound by that upside
down “A” at the start, including the one that corresponds to “themselves.”
But if we represented the sentence “He was sick” instead, it would look more like this.
Like the pronoun “he,” the variable here is left open to interpretation, and so the
statement as a whole can’t be determined to be true or false, unless the variable is
assigned some kind of value.
To handle these kinds of statements, logicians typically make use of what are called variable assignments.
Basically, it’s a mathematical tool that’s used to give free variables a value, so that
the expression as a whole can be assigned some sort of meaning.
Unfortunately, in everyday conversation, most people don’t have the benefit of a logician
standing by to tell them what their pronouns mean.
Instead, in a natural language like English, the variable assignment is provided by the
context, based on who’s around, or what’s already been talked about.
And so, where reflexive pronouns always have to be bound, non-reflexive pronouns have the
added option of being free.
Both kinds of pronouns, then, are variables of one sort or another; the only difference
is in how they’re handled.
Of course, that still isn’t quite the whole story.
Pronouns come in a number of different sizes and shapes, and can communicate not only who’s
being talked about, but also things like their gender, and whether they’re an individual or a group.
So how does that come into the mix?
Well, another way to ask the question is this: is information about gender and number, etc.,
part of what’s asserted, or part of what’s presupposed?
If you think back to our episode about the difference between words like “believe”
and “know,” we claimed they essentially mean the same thing, except that “know”
also presupposes, or takes for granted, that the following sentence is true, while “believe”
makes no such assumption.
In general, any expression can be classified by what it asserts and what it presupposes.
So how can we tell whether something like gender forms part of a pronoun’s core meaning,
or whether it’s a presupposition?
Well, for one, presuppositions are usually resilient, and stick around even when a sentence
is negated.
For instance, both “Helena knows she’s having twins” and “Helena doesn’t know
she’s having twins” suggest she’s having twins.
So, we can be sure that “know” — and the sentence as a whole — carry that assumption.
Applying the same logic to something like “Ferdinand loved her,” it seems “Ferdinand
didn’t love her” still carries the inference that whoever Ferdinand might have loved is
a woman, suggesting a feature like gender is in fact a presupposition.
Other tests can be applied too, like the presence of truth-value gaps.
When a sentence carries a false presupposition, it can often be difficult to judge whether
it’s straightforwardly true or false, leaving a kind of gap.
As a result, it’s hard to say whether a sentence like “My clone wears an eyepatch”
is true or false, if I don’t have a clone to begin with.
Administering the same test to pronouns, if the sentence “She went to Felix’s loft”
was said of Tony, who’s a man, it would be hard to say for sure whether it was clearly
true or false, even if he did go to the loft.
Instead, it looks like the presence of a false presupposition renders the sentence unusable.
So while their variable nature forms part of a pronoun’s core, asserted meaning, information
about features like gender and number are introduced as presuppositions. It just goes to show that
that there's only so much you can change about your identity.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you managed to identify all the variables, you learned that reflexive words like “herself”
don’t always pick out specific people, but instead connect up to quantifying words like
“everybody”; that their behaviour, along with the behaviour of non-reflexive pronouns
like “he” and “she,” can be explained by thinking of them as variables; and that
features like gender and number come into the mix as presuppositions, or assumptions,
about the kind of people being talked about.
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