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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
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54 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
anybody s story, the money and the crowd s being happy are quite different
sorts of things, why do we also need a difference between the meanings of
keep to explain what s going on in the examples?
People sometimes used to say that exist must be ambiguous because
look at the difference between chairs exist and numbers exist . A familiar
reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence
of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between
numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you
don t also need exist to be polysemic.
This reply strikes me as convincing, but the fallacy that it exposes dies
awfully hard. For example, Steven Pinker (personal communication, 1996)
has argued that keep can t be univocal because it implies possession in
sentences like J2 but not in sentences like J3. I think Pinker is right that
Susan kept the money entails that something was possessed and that
Sam kept the crowd happy doesn t. But (here we go again) it just begs the
question to assume that this difference arises from a polysemy in keep .
For example: maybe keep has an underlying complement in sentences
like (2) and (3); so that, roughly, Susan kept the money is a variant of
Susan kept having the money and John kept the crowd happy is a variant
of John kept the crowd being happy. Then the implication of possession in
the former doesn t derive from keep after all; rather, it s contributed by
material in the underlying complement clause. On reflection, the difference
between keeping the money and keeping the crowd happy does seem
strikingly like the difference between having the money and the crowd
being happy, a fact that the semantics of (2) and (3) might reasonably be
expected to capture. This modest analysis posits no structure inside lexical
items, and it stays pretty close to surface form. I wouldn t want to claim
that it s apodictic, but it does avoid the proliferation of lexical polysemes
and/or semantic fields and it s quite compatible with the claim that keep
means neither more nor less than keep in all of the examples under
consideration.10
Auntie: Fiddlesticks. Consider the case where language A has a single
unambiguous word, of which the translation in language B is either of
two words, depending on context. Everybody who knows anything knows
that happens all the time. Whenever it does, the language-A word is ipso
10
Fodor and Lepore (forthcoming a) provides some independent evidence for the
analysis proposed here. Suppose, however, that this horse won t run, and the asymmetry
Pinker points to really does show that keep is polysemous. That would be no comfort to
Jackendoff, since Jackendoff s account of the polysemy doesn t predict the asymmetry of
entailments either: that J2 but not J3 belongs to the semantic field possession in
Jackendoff s analysis is pure stipulation.
But I won t stress this. Auntie says I should swear off ad hominems.
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The Linguist s Tale 55
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