9.3. Background and foreground: The structure of essential properties

The two hypotheses that stimulated my analysis—(1) general encyclopedic com­petence is distinct from a more specific semantic competence; and (2) within se­mantic competence it is possible to distinguish between typical and essential properties—have proved productive in interpretative terms. Both these distinc­tions have significant consequences on the plane of textual interpretation in that they determine different restrictions for the speaker and the listener, and exhibit different degrees of erasability, identifying different mechanisms of textual func­tioning. In the following pages I will show that essential properties, which consti­tute what we might consider the nucleus on which our judgements of semanticity are based, also have an internal structure, following a general principle of organi­zation into background and foreground.

9.3.1. Two types of negation

An important indication of this can be observed in negative sentences. The nega­tion of a term does not generally cancel all properties, and these canceled proper­ties are not necessarily always the same. In this respect, negation interacts with the structure of the semantic frame and with its internal organization. It is possible to distinguish between two types of negation according to the properties that lie within the scope of the negation.

Let's consider the case of bachelor, which, as we know, can be defined by the properties "male," "human," "adult," "unmarried";¹³ its negation, however, seems not to affect all these properties to the same extent, but only negates the last one. The most probable inference that can be drawn from (10):

10. Jerry is not a bachelor.

is that Jerry has a wife.¹⁴ The difference between this case and the negation of one of the other three properties is clear if we compare (11) with (12), (13), and (14):

11. Jerry is not a bachelor. He got married in Mexico.

12. Jerry is not a bachelor. He is two months old.

13. Jerry is not a bachelor. Jerry is a woman.

14. Jerry is not a bachelor. Jerry is a monkey.

What is negated in (12), (13), and (14) are the conditions of applicability of the term bachelor and therefore the possibility of using the term. It is as if one said: "It is not possible 10 predicate onto Jerry llie property o( 'bachelor' because this term can only be used correctly in relation to an adult, male, human being, while

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in each of these sentences Jerry lacks one of these qualities." As I said in chapter 6, the features "male," "human," and "adult" constitute the preconditions for the use of bachelor and therefore lie at a different level to the property "unmarried." For this reason, their negation is a metalinguistic negation; in fact, this is signaled in oral discourse by intonation, and often in written discourse by diacritic signs such as quotation marks. Commas and intonation always determine a metalin­guistic interpretation of the term to which they refer, underlining the fact that they belong to a different linguistic level of reference, de dicto and not de re. Fill­more refers to the same phenomenon in terms of internal versus external negation; by internal he means a negation which lies within the frame, accepting it, and by external a negation which rejects the frame.¹⁵

Metalinguistic negation, apart from its particular prosodic or graphic mark­ing, is distinguished by two important characteristics at the level of discourse functioning. In the first place, it is always citational, that is, it cites the words of another person in order to contest its appropriateness. It is not possible to imagine a context where someone utters (12), (13), or (14) without someone else having previously introduced the "bachelor" frame into the discourse. This dialogic char­acter is intrinsic to the metalinguistic nature of this utterance; it would be difficult to understand how someone could, with the same speech act, make a linguistic choice and negate it at the same time. In the second place, metalinguistic negation marks a discursive rupture that requires explanation and imposes a new textual development. In fact, representing as it does a rejection of the frame within which the discourse has been functioning, external or metalinguistic negation does not allow continuation of the same argument, which, on the other hand, is possible after an internal negation. This is because the conditions no longer exist for a conversational move regarding the same argument. Each metalinguistic negation is necessarily followed by a change or renegotiation of the topic of discourse; the frame must be changed, and the person who has cast into doubt the appropriate­ness of the other persons linguistic choice—because that ultimately is the signifi­cance of metalinguistic negation—is required to produce an explanation for his or her own linguistic behavior.

The difference between the two kinds of negation implies that the respective properties do not lie on the same plane and that they carry out different semantic functions. While the property "unmarried" represents the specific content, in a certain sense the new information conveyed by the term, the other properties form the framework of applicability of the term. I will call the latter background prop­erties, while the properties that fall within the field of internal negation are fore­ground properties.

9.3.2. The case of presuppositions

I he distinction between these two levels in semantic' structure has already been recognized and analyzed in relation to a particular class ol expressions named

"semantic preiuppojltione" (cf. Violi 19нH, Kco and Violi 1987), These.exprei

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sions, by virtue of some aspect of their form, simultaneously convey two different types of content, one of which is explicitly stated, while the other is presupposed. Examples 15-21 indicate these two levels of meaning, the one that is presupposed (pr) and the one that is stated (st):

15. George regrets that Mary has left him.

pr: Mary has left George, st: George is sorry about it.

16. Mary has managed to leave George.

pr: Mary wanted to leave George and it was not easy, st: Mary has left George.

17. Charles has stopped smoking.

pr: Charles used to smoke.

st: Charles does not smoke now.

18. Peter criticized Anne for leaving.

pr: Anne left.

st: Peter said that it was wrong.

19. Peter accused Anne of leaving.

pr: It was wrong to leave {or Peter thinks it was wrong to leave), st: Peter said that Anne had done so.

20. When did Mary leave? pr: Mary has left.

st: One wonders when.

21. If Paul had married Mary, he would have been happy.

pr: Paul did not marry Mary.

st: Marriage with Mary would make Paul happy.

If we consider the corresponding negative sentences, it becomes clear that the lev­els of stated and presupposed meaning are not the same. The negation of (15):

15'. George does not regret that Mary has left him.

continues to convey the same presupposed content as the affirmative sentence, namely that Mary has left George. Likewise,

17'. Charles has not stopped smoking.

still presupposes thai Charles smoked in die past.

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The negation does not affect the presuppositions, which can be considered to be that part of the informational content conveyed by a text which is subject to the mutual agreement of both participants in the interaction; presuppositions constitute a kind of textual frame circumscribing and delimiting the point of view within which the discourse can develop. This textual frame is the background of the text itself, and is distinct from other information representing the foreground. The background is not the same as the notion of old information,¹⁷ but rather denotes that content which the participants tacitly assume as the shared base of the discourse, and which is not subject to challenge.™ It organizes the textual perspective which structures the information in the discourse, placing part of the content in a zone of mutual agreement for both speaker and listener. In this sense, all pre­suppositions have a function of textual integration, distributing information at different levels of discourse (respectively the background and the foreground).

Utterance of sentence 19,

19. Peter accused Anne of leaving.

introduces into the discourse, by virtue of the presuppositions conventionally con­veyed by the verb accuse, a background frame in which the departure of Anne is judged negatively. This judgement establishes the textual perspective within which the discourse can develop from this point onward, and to which the interlocutors are called upon to conform. What happens when this background frame is refuted and the very presuppositions of the discourse are negated? Let's compare (15') with (22):

15'. George does not regret that Mary has left him.

22. George does not regret that Mary has left him because Mary has not left him at all.

The difference between these two negations is similat to the one that we observed in the case of bachelor: it is the difference between a factual (or internal) negation and a metalinguistic (or external) negation. In (22) the stated content, object of the emotive state of the regret, is not denied; rather, what is negated is the appro priateness of the use of the term to regret in that particular context. The negation in (22) is metalinguistic, that is, it is a negation of the frame that represents the shared background of the discourse. In this case too the metalinguistic negation must be citational: in the course of a conversation, (22) can only be uttered in response to the previous words of someone else. The metalinguistic nature of the utterance is marked by the particular intonation that always accompanies nega­tion in these cases, and which marks the negated term as being reported.

Because this negation rejects the frame that another speaker has attempted to impose on the discourse, a complex "repair strategy" must ensue, which on the

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one hand explains the reasons for the utterance, and on the other introduces a new argumentative direction into the discourse.

Challenging the speakers frame always produces textual effects, because chang­ing frame changes the direction of a discourse. So the challenge of a frame be­comes a textual change of topic. (Eco and Violi 1987: 13)

p.5.5. The hierarchy of properties

The behavior of semantic presuppositions, which are all dependent on the seman­tics of individual terms, has clear analogies with the case of bachelor which we considered in section 9.3.1. In both cases, when the negation affects certain seman­tic properties, it seems to become explicitly metalinguistic, with all the textual consequences that have already been observed. One might hypothesize, therefore, that in both cases the semantic properties are not all at the same level, but are structured according to an internal hierarchy that places some features in a back­ground that is generally assumed to be shared, while others, which are subject to negation, are in the foreground. I do nor intend by this to claim that the phe­nomenon of presuppositions must be extended to all the terms of the lexicon; on the contrary, the concept of presupposition should be limited to certain specific cases (like the previously listed ones and a few others)¹⁹ which explicitly and un­equivocally possess the characteristics described above.

We can, however, assume that a very general property of language is that it organizes its content according to an internal hierarchical structure; consequently not all information has the same status or discursive importance. It is possible to consider this property, present at all levels of linguistic structure, as a mechanism of textual localization.²⁰ By virtue of its form, every discourse imposes a textual perspective that forces us to see reality, events, and concepts according to a point of view in which some items of content possess a greater saliency or importance. In the lexicon, this "embedding" of content clearly and specifically manifests itself in semantic presuppositions, where two different levels of content are conveyed by the same expression. But it can also be traced, in a fuzzier and more general way, in the whole of lexical structure. The background/foreground distinction reflects a general principle of economy in the internal structuring of lexical properties, whereby some properties are more salient, and often convey so-called new infor­mation, while others possess a more general content constituting the background of the discourse. The question that now needs answering is whether this distribu­tion of properties is systematic and displays significant regularities.

In many cases, the internal structure of semantic featutes seems to depend on the categorial hierarchy of hyponyms and hypernyms upon which the lexicon is in part constructed, and the foreground often corresponds to the last subordinate semantic category which a given term belongs to. Each act of predication is at the same lime an act ol categorization which asserts that a given element is a token

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of a certain type, or possibly, of several types. So, when we say Peter is a bachelor, we are saying that the token "Peter" is of the "bachelor" type (belonging, in other words, to the bachelor category). However, with the same act of predication we generally carry out more than one categorial judgement, because each token al­ways belongs to various categories, in that categorization is hierarchically organ­ized. When we say Peter is a bachelor, we are also saying that Peter, as token, is of the "man" type, the "adult" type, and the "male" type (besides, naturally, the "unmarried" type).

With the negation we negate a categorization judgement, that is, we negate that the token in question belongs to a certain type. Now the type that by pref­erence is affected by negation belongs to the most subordinate level, which is the most specific one (in the case of bachelor this is "unmarried") .The superordinate properties are in this case very generic categories, like STATE, EVENT, LIVING BEING, ANIMAL, THING, etc., that constitute a kind of background that is not normally affected by negation, which tends to be oriented toward more specific foreground properties. Usually, in fact, as we have already noted, the sen­tence Peter is not a bachelor is interpreted as a negation of the foreground and not as a negation of the background properties ("human," "adult," or "male"). This only occurs in particular, citational discursive situations, in which the "anomaly" of the negation is marked by its metalinguistic reading.

However, for many predicates the distribution of properties in the back­ground and the foreground seems to obey a different principle. Let's compare once again cases of internal negation and metalinguistic negation.

23. John did not eat the chicken. It is still all there. 23'. John did not eat the chicken. He devoured it.

24. Mary did not buy the book. She did not have enough money. 24'. Mary did not buy the book. She stole it.

25. I do not think that Charles is stupid. I think he is bright. 25'. I do not think that Charles is stupid. I am certain of it.

In each pair, the first negation is internal, while the second is external or metalin­guistic. Now, while internal negation negates the occurrence of the specific action described by the verb—consuming food in (23), exchanging money for a product in (24), and having a certain mental content in (25)—metalinguistic negation seems rather to refer to the way in which the action has been performed.

In (23') there is no denial that the chicken has been consumed (a specific property we could consider to be the foreground of the verb eat); what is con­tested is the appropriateness ol the term in that tin- way in which the action lias been carried out does not tome under the description o( eat, but seems to be more appropriately described by the verb devour. In (/.)') what is denied is the possibility ol using the term buy, not that the final stair is different from il the

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book had been purchased. Mary effectively possesses the book in question, un­like in (24), but her method of acquiring it is not envisaged by buy: there has been no exchange of goods and money (what in fact has occurred is theft, illicit appro­priation in that an exchange has not taken place). The background includes, there­fore, the particular means (the goods-money exchange) by which one comes into possession of that product, while the final state, which is the subject of the inter­nal negation, constitutes the foreground. Likewise, in (25') there is no denial of the specific content of a certain mental state; what is denied is the epistemic mo­dality with which that content is presented (uncertainty versus certainty of judge­ment). As in the previous examples, the metalinguistic negation does not block the content, or the carrying out of the action, which in this case consists of having a certain belief. On the contrary, the metalinguistic negation affirms the specific content of the verb: in (23'), John has actually consumed the chicken, in (24'), Mary has entered into possession of the book, and in (25'), Charles really is con­sidered stupid by the speaker. What is denied is that the action has been carried out in a way that conforms to the description suggested by the use of that par­ticular predicate.

The existence in all tliese cases of two different forms of negation, according to the different properties that are blocked, leads us to the view that properties do not all have the same status; some are more general and constitute the background of the term, while others are in the foreground. Metalinguistic negation, by block­ing the background properties, questions the appropriateness of the term in that particular case, in that it negates the applicability conditions of that term. It re­mains to be seen whether this distinction is present throughout the lexicon and in all lexical categories. Certainly, in the cases in which the background contains the more generic properties and the foreground the more specific ones, the internal distribution of properties between the two levels may vary greatly from term to term. Very general terms like thing, for example, will correspond entirely with the general category and will consequently have very little content at the level of back­ground. Thus, their internal or context-free negation (This is not a thing) will prove to be highly generic because no content remains to constitute the back­ground. The more specific the term, the broader its background will be. In other cases, for instance the predicates we have examined, the background does not relate to more generic properties, but concerns the means by which a given action is carried out.

Although the background/foreground distinction can be considered a general characteristic of lexical organization, the content involved varies, being specific to different cases. This brings us to the question of whether it is possible to formulate a unitary model for the entire lexicon.

10

THE MANY DIMENSIONS OF MEANING

10.1. Toward a non-unified model of lexical semantics

In the course of this book, I have on numerous occasions pointed out the diffi­culty of achieving a unified treatment of the whole lexicon, not only in relation to the representation of different parts of speech, but also even within the same lexical class. It does not seem possible to define a single semantic structure which can be uniformly described by the same system of representation; rather, lexical meanings appear in the form of diversified, partially superimposed, structures. Unification of the representational format is an insuperable problem for all the theories we have considered thus far; both the classical structuralist and the pro­totypical approaches have proved inadequate as sole, all-encompassing models. Indeed, the real problem is the totalizing nature of any model that imposes itself over and above all other models, presuming to possess the only explicative criteria; the dominant imperialism of theories extends the merely locally verified supe­riority of a given model to the semantic system as a whole, replacing all other possible alternatives. In reality, things are not like that at all, and no model seems entirely capable of dealing exhaustively with the whole lexicon; different repre­sentations exist alongside each other and require the co-presence of a plurality of variously articulated models.

Consider the case of prototype semantics in relation to classical models. Without doubt, the classical structural description based on NSCs is incapable ol representing the whole lexicon, mainly because elements of content cannot be inventoried. The principle of the immanence of signification constructs meaning as an autonomous and formal entity, detached from its origins, defined by a series of regulated procedures that codify it into systems ol equivalence. On the plane ol content, such a reductive process is unworkable because the segmentation ol content, that is, the categorization ol the natural world, cannot by its very nature

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be divided into pre-established entities but is an infinitely open process—in a word, it is unlimited semiosis par excellence. Given that a semantics of language is inseparable from a semantics of the natural world, and that the schemata we use to understand language are no different from those we use to comprehend the world, then if experience of the world cannot be reduced to a limited and pre-established inventory, neither can linguistic meaning. The impossibility of fixing an inventory of the figures of content entails the impossibility of a complete interdefinition of concepts, a vital requisite for an authentic structural treatment of linguistic meaning.

From this point of view, the prototypical approach, which has given rise to the semantics of prototypes, has the fundamental merit of conceiving the organi­zation of meaning in terms of a principle of resemblance rather than equivalence, thereby opening up the possibility of a treatment of lexical meaning that is more in line with mental processes of comprehension, categorization, and interpreta­tion. Regarding the concrete semantic representarion of individual terms, however, this does not mean that all lexical entries can be represented within the prototype model, nor that there are no sub-sectors of the lexicon for which criterial defini­tions remain valid, nor that there are no areas with mixed characteristics.

Consider those terms that I suggested calling definitional terms because of their linguistically defined nature. In this class there are lexemes such as hypote­nuse, square, even, and odd whose criteria of application are fixed by linguis­tic definition; they have corresponding classical categories with clearly defined boundaries, and the properties that characterize them are in effect necessary and sufficient conditions. Classical structural analysis, based on criterial features, is perfectly adequate for semantic representation of these cases. The majority of terms in this group belong to technical and scientific vocabulary (mathematical and geometrical terms, and so forth), which explains how their meaning is fixed by definition. These concepts are also interdefined, one of the other conditions required by classical structural analysis. Interdefinability, with the consequent possibility of determining a small number of primitive elements from which all the others are generated, is only possible with some circumscribed, generally scientific, fields. In these cases, there is no prototypical structure, and even if pro­totypical effects are observed—remember the case of even and odd numbers— such effects, albeit psychologically interesting, do not seem very important to the meaning of the words. For terms of this kind, which form a closed and arbitrary set in which interpretation is totally based on the previous definition, and where there are no semantically significant typical features, structural, non-inferential semantics is perfectly adequate.

However, the different lexical treatment of various classes opens up the more complex and deeper problem of the adequacy of representational models, in that it directly affects the ontological status of the linguistically represented entities. If there is no single and unitary treatment for lexical semantics, this depends on the fact that language refers to experiential saliencies which are of various kinds. If the semantics of cat is not the same as that of triangle ok shame, it is because our

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experiences of cats, triangles, and shame are different in nature, differently moti­vated, and based on different properties. The diversity that emerges in the surface manifestations of the lexicon needs to be traced back to these differences among the various forms of experience. In order to describe the level of lexical manifes­tation properly, it is necessary to go back to the characteristics of the underlying forms of experience that determine both the selection of semantic properties and their configurations (for example, by prototypical densification rather than by classical categories).

There are three interwoven dimensions here: an ontological dimension relat­ing to the different modalities and forms of experience; a semanric dimension which produces a typology of semantic properties; and finally the ways in which these dimensions are realized in the various parts of speech and lexical categories.