PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH …PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH DEFINITE ARTICLE ERIC K. ACTON Eastern Michigan University ... In discourse surrounding

PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH DEFINITE ARTICLE

ERIC K ACTON

Eastern Michigan UniversityEckert (2008) rightly points out that context variation and indexicality are inextricably bound

This workmdashan in-depth case study of the social significance of the English definite articlemdashpresents a picture whereby semantic meaning is part of that same web of interrelations The primaryempirical claim of this work is that using the with a plural NP (eg the Americans) to talk about allor typical members of a group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith separate fromthe speaker and to an extent that using a bare plural (eg Americans) does not I present two varia-tionist corpus-based studies that provide clear evidence of this effect I then provide a principledaccount of the effect building on the insights of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research and ex-tending their collective reach As I show the effect is largely rooted in crucial differences betweenthe semantic meaning of the-plurals and that of related alternative expressions As with a broadrange of associated phenomena the exact interpretation of a particular the-plural on a given occa-sion of use depends importantly upon its indexical character the beliefs of the speech participantsand myriad other contextual factors but is nonetheless constrained in a principled wayKeywords pragmatics sociolinguistics definiteness social meaning corpus linguistics semantics

lsquoLet me be clear I donrsquot trust the Republicans hellip rsquomdashUS Republican Senator Ted Cruz 2013

1 Introduction The English definite article is most assuredly not a word to be tri-fled with Research on the semantics of definites predates the invention of the talking pic-ture and to date there is a lack of consensus even as to whether the carries an existencepresupposition (Coppock amp Beaver 2012) let alone agreement concerning uniquenessand familiarity (eg Strawson 1950 Birner amp Ward 1994 Roberts 2002 Abbott 2008Elbourne 2013)

The demands the respect not only of the linguist and the grammarian but of the every-day English speaker as well Indeed speakers must wield the with care for the use ofthis unassuming function word commonest of all English expressions can in fact sendpotent social signals Reference to onersquos own spouse as lsquothe wifersquo for example paints adifferent picture of the speakerrsquos marriage than does a reference to lsquomy wifersquo At thevery least the former suggests extra distance between speaker and referent relative tothe latter And it is this same basic dynamic that US Republican Senator Ted Cruz ex-ploited in his ironic remark in the epigraph above suggesting an outsider status vis-agrave-vis his own party Example 1a likewise exhibits this meaning where the Americansgenerally suggests that the speaker of 1a is not an American Absent the as in 1b the ef-fect is diminished

(1) a The Americans love carsb Americans love cars

This workmdashpart of a larger project relating semantics pragmatics and sociolinguis-ticsmdashpresents an in-depth study of the social meaning of the Specifically I show thatusing the with a plural NP (a lsquothe-pluralrsquo) to talk about all or typical members of a group

37

This work benefited immensely from the contributions of many people among them Sara Acton AlexDjalali Penny Eckert Rob Podesva Chris Potts Daniel Seely Ewart Thomas Elizabeth Traugott and mystudents in the 2015 section of LING 535 at Eastern Michigan as well as audiences at Eastern MichiganStanford and LSA 2017 I am also deeply grateful to Megan Crowhurst Kathryn Campbell-Kibler ChrisKennedy and two anonymous referees for their thoughtful and incisive reviews This research was supportedin part by an Eastern Michigan University Provostrsquos New Faculty Award

Printed with the permission of Eric K Acton copy 2019

of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith of which the speaker is not amembermdashand to an extent that using a bare plural (BP) does not

Although using a the-plural very often does suggest that the speaker is not a memberof the relevant group is deemphasizing their membership in the group or is emphasiz-ing their nonmembership1mdashwhat I call the distancing effect of the-pluralsmdashthemeaning is not an entailment In 2 for instance it is clear that the Tea Party Patriotsand the possessors implicit in our pertain to the same group of individuals

(2) The Tea Party Patriots depend on grassroots activism where it counts nearyou Local Groups are the backbone of our activities across the nation

(from the website of the lsquoTea Party Patriotsrsquo)2

Being nonentailed the meaning of interest does not fit squarely within the purview ofsemantics This suggests a need to turn to the subdisciplines that address nonentailedmeaning namely pragmatics and increasingly sociolinguisticsmdashparticularly sociolin-guistics in the third wave of variation studies (Eckert 2012) Indeed doing justice tothe present phenomenonmdashand a broad class of related phenomena besidesmdashmeansdrawing from connecting and extending both traditions

Concerning sociolinguistics the meaning of interest is social in nature in that it con-cerns the speakerrsquos relation to other individuals Moreover as I show in sect3 the phe-nomenon is amenable to variationist research Accordingly sociolinguistics has muchto offer here However the present case departs from the vast majority of variationistsociolinguistic research for which the relevant variants do not bear propositional mean-ing themselves or for which it is assumed lsquothat distinctions in referential value among[variants] are neutralized in discoursersquo (Tagliamonte amp Denis 201497 citing Sankoff1988153 see also Romaine 1984 Cheshire 2005) Instead the meaning of interest cru-cially depends upon differences between the encoded semantic meaning of the-pluralsand that of related alternative forms

Accordingly pragmatics too has much to offer in the present case Pragmatic researchhas greatly illuminated the dynamics by which utterances are enriched with nonentailedmeanings (eg Grice 1975 Horn 1984 Sperber amp Wilson 2004) At the same time thepresent phenomenon (and many others like it) calls for extending the insights of previ-ous research and complementing them with sociolinguistic theory and methodology

The remainder of this article is organized as follows I first provide a more thoroughoverview of the meanings of interest (sect2) and then present two corpus-based varia-tionist studies that show that the effect is clearly reflected in usage patterns and is sen-sitive to contextual factors (sect3) In sect4 I provide an overview of the insights that thetraditions of pragmatics and sociolinguistics offer for explaining the distancing andmonolithizing effects of the and connect and extend these insights in sect5 and sect6 in orderto explain these effects As I show a full account calls for an analysis that is at once semantic pragmatic and sociolinguistic Section 7 takes stock of the findings and theanalytical approach of the present article looking toward future sociolinguistic prag-matic and semantic research

2 More examples of the meaning As discussed with respect to example 1 andthe epigraph from Ted Cruz the use of the in talking about individuals often engendersa distancing effect A 1958 book of photographs of life in the US titled The Americansprovides another sharp illustration Authored by Swiss-born photographer Robert

38 LANGUAGE VOLUME 95 NUMBER 1 (2019)

1 I thank a referee for the suggestion to foreground the set-membership basis of the distancing effect2 lsquoTea Party Patriotsrsquo httpswwwteapartypatriotsorg last accessed July 10 2015

Frank who immigrated to the US in 1947 lsquo[i]t was initially dismissed as the jaundicedwork of an unpatriotic cynicrsquo (McAlley 2009np) Arts critic Richard B Woodwardwrites lsquoWhat was most upsetting about Mr Frankrsquos take hellip was first of all theprovocative title It is as though the people in his pages were an alien species and he amore evolved anthropologistrsquo (Woodward 2009np) The title of a 2009 exhibition ofFrankrsquos work at the National Gallery of Art lsquoLooking in Robert Frankrsquos ldquoThe Ameri-cansrdquo rsquo further depicts Frank as an outsider

The same dynamics underlie the remarkability of Republican Donald Trumprsquos re-portedly frequent use of the phrase the Republicans An article from the Economistaptly titled lsquoOutsidersrsquo chancersquo observes lsquoDonald Trump hellip was once a registered De-mocrat and still refers derisively to his party as ldquothe Republicansrdquo as if it is some un-promising acquisition he has been arm-twisted into buyingrsquo (Outsidersrsquo chance 2016)

Additional evidence of the distancing effect of the can be found in its use in dis-paraging generalizations discourse on marginalization descriptions of social opposi-tions and lsquous-versus-themrsquo rhetoric

(3) Faced with the prospect of a war against all humans reformulate the conflictinto a war of nearly all against a fewmdashagainst the Jews or the communistsor the gays or the feminists or the Mexican immigrants (Placher 2009)

(4) Paid for by Bernie 2016 (not the billionaires)3(from US Senator Bernie Sandersrsquos presidential campaign website)

(5) And I just ask some of you that are back on the East Coast come down to theborder and talk to those of us that have seen what happens when the politi-cians play politics with something that ends up costing peoplersquos lives hellip

(Republicans backed into a corner 2012)

In each example the relevant groups are depicted as separate removed or opposedMoreover I submit that in every case the removal of the would dull the tone of separa-tion or derogation to some extent

The distancing effect is so pronounced in some cases that certain the-plurals seem tohave attained taboo or near-taboo status In discourse surrounding race and ethnicity inthe US the blacks is a clear example Indeed the phrase the blacks is virtually absent incontemporary mainstream US news media despite myriad tokens of blacks In theeleven months following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri for in-stance whereas in the New York Times and the Washington Post tokens of the BP blacksin articles containing the word Ferguson number in the hundreds there are only twosuch tokens of the blacks Tellingly both tokens occur not in the authorsrsquo own words but in quotations and one of them provided as example 6 is especially transparent inits prejudice

(6) lsquoThey always want to stir up to trouble the blacksrsquo (Robertson 2014)

A similar pattern holds for the gays for which the effect is strong enough as to be em-ployed in representations of individuals presumed to be unsympathetic toward or unfa-miliar with gay people Example 7 from the review of a play on gay politics in 1980sGreat Britain illustrates

(7) When a curious older woman insists on calling Mark and his friends lsquothegaysrsquo and asks wide-eyed questions about all gay women being vegetariansthe naiumlveteacute could be dismissed as a cheap and easy laugh (Hornaday 2014)

Pragmatics and the social life of the English definite article 39

3 httpsberniesanderscom last accessed June 30 2016

Of course in many cases the effect is not so pronounced and problematic In fact thedistancing meaning can be canceled or overshadowed by other considerations (as in ex-ample 2) a matter about which I have more to say later Generally however using athe-plural does tend to have a distancing effect (as in examples 1 and 3ndash7) and I claimto a greater extent than the use of a BP If this is so it should be reflected in usage pat-terns For one thing we ought to find that ceteris paribus speakersrsquo the-plural-to-BPratio should be higher when talking about groups of which they are nonmembers orfrom which they wish to express distance than when talking about groups of which theyare a part or for which they have an affinity In the next section I show via two corpus-based variationist studies that this is indeed the case

3 Two variationist studies I begin with a study of the use of the-plurals and BPsby members of the US House of Representatives to refer to Democrats and Republicansover a twenty-year period In accordance with the discussion above representativeshave a much higher the-plural-to-BP ratio in talking about their opposing party than intalking about their own I then present an analysis of terms used on the political talkshow The McLaughlin Group to talk about Democrats and Republicans that providesfurther evidence of this pattern At the same time key differences between the two cor-pora lead to results that differ in other predictable ways underscoring the importanceof context in the use and significance of these expressions

By linking patterns of variation to differences in the social significance of the vari-ants of interest (in this case the -plurals and BPs) this work bears the defining trait ofwhat Eckert calls the lsquothird waversquo of sociolinguistic variationist research (see sect42) Atthe same time the present work departs from the mainstream of variationist research inthat the variants of interest are not equivalent even in their propositional meaningsThey can however be used for similar communicative purposesmdashnamely for talkingabout all or typical individuals of a particular type It is under such circumstances thatthe two kinds of expression may be reasonably treated as alternatives to one another(Romaine 1984 Walker 2010 Cameron amp Schwenter 2013) thereby serving as an ap-propriate basis for variationist study But the underlying semantic differences betweenthese expression types must not be glossed over despite their shared communicativefunction under the relevant circumstances On the contrary I later show that these dif-ferences are the very kernel of the social meaning of interest31 ThE in the us house of representatives To provide empirical evidence of

the distancing effect of the I turn to Djalalirsquos (2013) house proceedings corpus(HPC) a complete set of transcripts of the proceedings of the US House of Representa-tives from February 1993 through December 2012 The HPC provides an ideal testingground for the hypothesis given its size (tens of millions of words) its diversity of par-ticipants (over 800 distinct speakers) and the partisan nature of the discourse

The principle measure of interest is in 8 henceforth the the-percentage or the-(8) For any plural count noun Xs and set of speakers S the ThE-percentage(ThE-) for Xs for S is defined as SsisinS ( of srsquos tokens of the Xs) SsisinS ( of srsquos tokens of the Xs + of srsquos to-kens of BP Xs)

Based on this measure the hypothesis for this section is given in 9(9) Hypothesis On average representatives will have a higher the- when

talking about the opposing party than when talking about their ownCategorizing tokens for inclusion There are more than 70000 tokens of

Democrats and Republicans in the HPC so analyzing each token by hand is time-prohibitive The following methodology was adopted instead


The initial data set included every sentence in the HPC containing at least one tokenof Democrats or Republicans The corpus contains a handful of duplicate transcriptsany sentences that were duplicative in terms of the sentence itself the speaker nameand the date of utterance were removed Among the remaining sentences are 73242 to-kens of Democrats and Republicans To simplify the analysis slightly only the firsttoken of Democrats in sentences containing Democrats was analyzed and similarly forRepublicans so that 71199 (972) of all tokens were included in the analysis

The next step was to identify the determiner for each token Tokens of Democrats orRepublicans for which the noun was pre- or postnominally modified (eg Senate Dem -ocrats Republicans in the house) were excluded for two reasons First restricting theanalysis to unmodified tokens helps ensure that the tokens are comparable there is nodoubt a major difference between say (the) blue-collar Democrats and (the) Demo -crats Second admitting modified tokens would allow for cases in which the speaker isnot a member of the subgroup being talked about but is a member of the larger groupassociated with the head nounmdashcomplicating the picture significantly The determin-ers quantifiers and partitives coded for are enumerated in 10

(10) all Arabic numerals 2 through 999 (with or without of the) zero all writtennumeral terms two through twenty and the following expressions any (of the) all (of the) enough (of the) few (of the) fewer (of the) many(of the) most (of the) more (of the) no none of the other (of the) several(of the) some (of the) the these those my our your his her its their uswe you

Any token not immediately preceded by one of the items in 10 was coded as bare Somesuch tokens had a determiner with a modifier intervening but as stated above modi-fied tokens were ultimately excluded from the analysis Tokens preceded by the modi-fiers in 11 were excluded as were tokens followed by the items in 12 Each item in thelists was included on the basis of an actual token of Democrats or Republicans pre-cededfollowed by that item in the HPC

(11) committee subcommittee House Washington senate party well-respectedCongressional Texas California southern regular sensible senior juniorrank-and-file moderate conservative liberal centrist right-wing left-wingradical extremist fat-cat blue(-)collar blue(-)dog -and-spend brave newjudiciary fellow other(-)body good bad teenage Christian thoughtfulmean-spirited valiant responsible -life -choice key Bush Clinton Rea-gan Gingrich majority minority ruling ranking white black middle classpoor wealthy leading young freshm(ea)n do-nothing 30-something

(12) who on the on this on that on these on those in the in this in that inthese in those in Congress in Washington that are that were that will thatsaid that voted that promised up here

I further excluded tokens for which the relevant DP was the pivot of an existential thereas in lsquothere are Democrats on the panelrsquo because such tokens generally cannot be sub-stituted with the-plurals and where they can a substantial change in meaning resultsFinally any tokens for which the speaker was unidentified or neither a Democrat nor aRepublican were excluded The remaining 54393 tokensmdash30787 BPs and 23606 the-pluralsmdashserved as the basis for the the- calculations

To test the accuracy of this process a random sample of 250 of the original 71199sentences was checked by hand The automated procedure performed very well in termsof both precision and recall Among the 250 sample tokens 213 were marked for inclu-sion via the automated procedure Of those 213 967 were both correctly marked forinclusion and assigned the correct determiner There were an additional three tokens


marked for exclusion that ought to have been marked for inclusion so that in all 206(981) of the 210 true positives were retrieved and correctly categorized

The the-s based on the manual and automated labeling methods differed minimallyFor every combination of speaker party and party term the ratio of the the-s calcu-lated based on the two different methods was between 096 and 102 The only case inwhich the results based on automated labeling were more favorable to the present hy-pothesis was Republicansrsquo the- for the term Democrats where the manual approachyielded 453 and the automated labeling yielded 472 As the results below showthis potential bias has no substantial bearing on the evaluation of the hypothesisAggregate-level findings The results overwhelmingly support the hypothesis in

9 Table 1 presents the aggregate the-s for both parties for both party terms based onover 10000 tokens for each combination of speaker party and party term Democratsrsquothe- for the term Democrats is 304 compared with 544 for the term RepublicansConversely Republicansrsquo the- for the term Democrats is 533 compared with261 for the term Republicans This means that each partyrsquos the- for the opposingparty term is over 175 times higher than the the- for their own party term This holdseven if one scales down the the- of Democrats for Republicans by 40 to 512 inorder to account for the potential bias introduced by the automated labeling (see above)


4 In cases of coordination if the preceded only the first conjunct (less than 3 of all relevant cases of co-ordination in the data set) as in the Republicans and Democrats it was treated as taking scope over both

speaker party dem the- rep the- dem N rep NDemocratic 304 544 11352 18992Republican 533 261 13007 11042

Table 1 Aggregate the-s for US House representatives by party

Modeling the data A pair of exploratory mixed-effects models further confirmthat speaker party has a significant and dramatic effect on the use of the-pluralsBPs inthe HPC A comprehensive investigation of what other factors condition the use of theseexpressions would make for a productive study in its own right In the meantime I pre -sent the following initial investigation

As a step toward uncovering other contributory factors the 250 tokens used to validatethe coding methodology were examined for additional distributional patterns Two cleartrends emerged First coordination of nominal phrases containing Republicans andDem ocrats with and highly favors BPs over the-plurals in the samplemdashonly two of thethirty-five relevant instances of coordination involved the In addition sentences in thesample that include cooperative language also favor BPs over the -plurals In the eighteenrelevant sentences containing together alike bipartisan(ship) or work(seding) withevery one of the DPs of interest was a BP

To test the robustness of these observations in the larger corpus I used generalizedlinear mixed-effects modeling to predict whether a given token of Democrats occurredas a BP or as part of a the-plural on the basis of speaker party whether the token wasconjoined with Republicans via and4 and whether the carrier sentence contained to-gether alike bipartisan(ship) or work(seding) with (an attempt to code for coopera-tive language based on the operative words in the random sample)

Speaker identity was included in the model as a random-effect group (Johnson 2009Tagliamonte amp Denis 2014) Given the exploratory nature of this analysis nested mod-

els including each possible combination of (i) the interaction terms provided for by thethree independent variables and (ii) random-slope terms based on presence of coordina-tion or cooperative language were compared for statistical performance5 Models wererun using the glmer() function in R (Bates et al 2015 R Core Team 2012) and com-pared using Rrsquos anova() function The reported model is the simplest model that did notperform significantly worse than any other more complicated model (α = 005) The re-sults are provided in Table 2 under lsquomodel 1rsquo where positive coefficient estimates (col-umn lsquoestrsquo) favor the use of a the-plural over a BP

The estimates for lsquoSpeaker party-Rrsquo lsquoAnd-Yrsquo and lsquoCooperative-Yrsquo correspond to the effects of the speaker being a Republican coordination with the other party term via and and cooperative language in the carrier sentence respectively lsquoParty-R And-Yrsquo corresponds to the additional effect of coordination with and in Republicansrsquo talkabout Democrats


5 Random-slope terms based on speaker party were excluded as only four of the more than 800 speakers inthe corpus changed their political party during the relevant time frame none of whom had enough tokens todraw any substantial conclusions about their the-s before and after changing parties For simplicity randomslopes based on interactions were not pursued lme4 package version 0999999-0 was used

6 As for random effects in this model and the next the standard deviation values for each random effect rel-ative to its corresponding fixed-effect estimate indicates a fair amount of interspeaker variation in terms ofbaseline rates of the-plural use and to a lesser extent the effect of coordination

model 1 (the) Democrats model 2 (the) Republicans (N 24359 speakers 833) (N 30034 speakers 829)

fixed effects est SE z Pr(gt|z|) est SE z Pr(gt|z|)(intercept) minus0707 0061 minus1159 lt 0001 0341 0060 567 lt 0001Speaker party-R 1268 0084 1513 lt 0001 minus1173 0087 minus1340 lt 0001And-Y minus2016 0114 minus1772 lt 0001 minus2992 0108 minus2768 lt 0001Cooperative-Y minus0829 0070 minus1182 lt 0001 minus0803 0088 minus910 lt 0001Party-R And-Y minus0820 0153 minus536 lt 0001 1374 0151 911 lt 0001Party-R Coop-Y mdash mdash mdash mdash 0273 0134 204 0041

random effectsSpeaker (intercept) Var 0693 SD 0833 Var 0870 SD 0933Speaker (And-Y Var 0442 SD 0665 Var 0389 SD 0624

likelihooddeviance logLik minus13045 logLik minus15974AIC 26106 AIC 31948

Table 2 Models predicting the-plural (rather than BP) in the HPC

All effects are significant (α = 0001) in the expected direction Considering tokensof Democrats for which the token is neither coordinated with a Republicans-DP nor at-tended by cooperative language (759 of all relevant tokens) the model predicts amassive effect for speaker party whereby the the- for Democrats is 330 comparedwith 637 for Republicans At the same time coordination of the relevant kind sogreatly favors BPs as to nearly overwhelm the speaker-party effect where it doesoccurmdashbringing the predicted rates down to 62 and 93 respectively where thereis no attendant cooperative language and 29 and 43 where there is6

The results of an analogous model designed to predict the distribution of Republicansand the Republicans selected by the same means as the first is presented in Table 2 underlsquomodel 2rsquo This model is nearly identical to model 1 in structure the only difference beingthat here the interaction between speaker party and cooperative language just makes the

cut for statistical significance ( p = 0041) such that the presence of cooperative languagelowers Democratsrsquo the- for Republicans more than it lowers Republicansrsquo7

As in model 1 the effect of speaker party is enormous in cases where the relevanttoken is neither conjoined in the relevant way nor attended by cooperative language(801 of cases) so that the predicted rate of the Republicans is 585 for Democratsand 303 for Republicans Also as before coordination of the relevant kind sostrongly favors BPs as to effectively overwhelm the effect of speaker party in caseswhere it is presentmdashespecially when working in concert with cooperative languagewhere the the-s predicted by the model are 31 and 48 respectively

Fully accounting for the effects of cooperative language and coordination on the useof plural party terms will require further research In the meantime I submit that eventhese effects may in large part be explained by the same basic difference in social mean-ing underlying the speaker-party effect Inasmuch as the-plurals relative to BPs depictgroups of individuals as distant separate monoliths it stands to reason that BPs are bet-ter suited for messages citing or encouraging cooperation or togetherness between suchgroups ceteris paribus This as the models suggest is precisely what we find in theHPC as in example 13

(13) These are problems that Republicans are anxious to work with Democratson (Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) 27 October 2009)

As for sentences in which DPs containing the two party terms are conjoined via andsuch sentences typically suggest a commingling of both partiesmdashsimilarly disfavoringdistancing boundary-drawing the-plurals Indeed such sentences often contain cooper-ative language themselves thus doubly conveying an inclusive boundary-less tone as in 14

(14) We all agreemdashall of us Republicans and Democrats alikemdashthat cuts inwasteful spending are vital to our countryrsquos future

(William Keating (D-MA) 1 March 2011)

Furthermore the fact that coordination of party terms in this corpus entails namingonersquos own party may further favor BPs in such sentences using a the-plural for onersquosopposing party together with syntactic like-conjoins-with-like constraints (eg Levy2015) would pressure speakers to use a the-plural for their own party which is gener-ally undesirable for reasons again tied to the same social meaning Of course other fac-tors like considerations of rhythm and concision may well have a role to play too Inany case it seems that even the effects of the presence of coordination and cooperativelanguage are bound up with the same contrast in social meaning between BPs and the-plurals as is the effect of speaker partyDiscussion The foregoing analysis presents a dramatic pattern whereby members of

both parties use the-plurals rather than BPs at far higher rates when talking about theopposing party than when talking about their own This is exactly what we would ex-pect under the central empirical claim of this workmdashthat is that the-plurals more sothan BPs tend to depict the group of individuals being talked about as a monolith ofwhich the speaker is not a part The significant effects of cooperative language and co-ordination with and provide even further evidence of the monolithizing distancing ef-


7 This is not especially surprising As with coordination with and insofar as cooperative language bringsthe-s down to low levels for both parties the effect would have to be larger for Democrats whose baselinethe- for Republicans is much higher than Republicansrsquo The analogous effect is marginally significant inmodel 1 ( p = 0095)

fect of the-plurals We thus have a clear case of principled variation whereby differ-ences in meaning beget differences in use along social linesOn exceptions Despite the large effect size of speaker party it is worth noting that

some individuals in the HPC have the-s that run against this general pattern Amongthe representatives in the corpus who had at least ten tokens of both (the) Democratsand (the) Republicans 124 of Democrats and 138 of Republicans had at least asgreat a the- for their own party as for their opposing party These numbers are rela-tively small but not negligible

Of course onersquos party is not the only factor influencing onersquos choice of DP Some ofthese speakers for instance used the-plurals in indirect quotation in contexts where athe-plural might be expected because the quoted individual is not a member of the rele-vant party8

(15) People will say we could solve the problem of deficits if only the Democratsor the Congress would hold down spending

(Brian Baird (D-WA) 26 February 2003)(16) I want to respond to the comments [hellip from] some of my colleagues from

across the aisle in which they have said the Republicans did not participatein passing social security (Vernon Ehlers (R-MI) 11 August 1994)

Other tokens were direct quotations where the speaker had no choice as to what DP touse (assuming faithfulness to the original source) And still others were issued ironicallysuch that the speaker mocked the perspective of someone from the opposing party

(17) Anyone who objects to doing for Europe what European boys should bedoing naturally despises children almost as much as the Republicans hateold folks hellip (Robert Dornan (R-CA) 28 November 1995)

Moreover the monolithizing effect of the-plurals lends them well to cases in whichone wishes to present onersquos party as a solid unified front as in 18 and 19

(18) The Democrats are united on the need for a new direction in Iraq(John Larson (D-CT) 26 June 2006)

(19) What the Republicans are going to stand against is tying the funds our sol-diers need to do their jobs to benchmarks thought up by special interest groups

(Adrian Smith (R-NE) 9 March 2007)

And as observed above coordination of the two party terms and the presence of coop-erative language favor BPs as well

Speakers whose utterances about their own party were disproportionally influencedby any of these or other relevant considerations may well have had a higher the- fortheir own party even if they strongly identified with their party Moreover the picture isfurther complicated for any speakers who have a complex relationship with their party

Further investigation of the speech of the minority of representatives who spoke inunexpected ways must await future research The important points for the present arethat the vast majority of speakers in the HPC patterned as predicted and that multiplefactors (both linguistic and social) play a role in the use of the-plurals and BPs


8 A referee observes that such cases suggest that the distancing meaning can be embedded Potts (2007) notessimilar cases of embedding with expressives like bastard and accounts for them by endowing expressives witha context-sensitive judge parameter That analysis might not apply as well to the present casemdashwhereas ex-pressing some judgersquos emotional state or evaluative stance is the raison drsquoecirctre for expressives (thus calling fora judge parameter) this is not so for the-plurals Due to limited space however I must leave further explorationof the theoretical consequences of embedded-but-nonentailed social meanings for future research

The thoroughly partisan nature of the HPC makes it ideal for seeing the social mean-ing of interest in action But there are also lessons to be learned from investigating the same issues in a corpus that differs from the HPC in important ways For that I turn now to a study of talk about Democrats and Republicans on the talk show TheMcLaughlin Group32 ThE on the mclaughlin group The McLaughlin Group (aired 1982ndash2016)

was a weekly political talk show featuring the discussion of topical issues among fivepundits including host John McLaughlin who moderated and added commentary ofhis own The corpus for this study (hereafter the MGC) consists of the 154 consecutiveepisodes airing from May 23 1998 through May 13 2001 and contains over 700000words As I show below the distancing effect of the obtains in this corpus as it did in theHPC Due to crucial differences between the two corpora however certain aspects ofthe results are importantly different Key differences and predictions The first key difference is that whereas the HPC

consists of speech from individuals transparently speaking as representatives of their re-spective parties the MGC being based in a journalistic program involves greater pres-sure on participants to exhibit objectivity and avoid overt displays of partisanship

The second related difference is that the pundits in the MGC in talking about Dem -ocrats and Republicans are often talking about Democratic and Republican politiciansin particular and unlike the speakers in the HPC none of the pundits in this studyserved as an elected official during the relevant time span Thus wherever references tolsquo(the) Republicansrsquo or lsquo(the) Democratsrsquo are meant to say something about Republicanor Democratic politicians specifically MGC participants are speaking as outside ob-servers regardless of their party affiliations whereas HPC participants are often talkingabout groups of which they truly are members

These two differences yield two predictions First given the pressure for MGCspeakers to temper their political biases we should expect that the difference between agiven speakerrsquos the-s for the two parties (ThE- differential) will generally besmaller in the MGC than in the HPC as a large differential could signal heavy bias infavor of one party over the other Second since in referring to lsquo(the) Democratsrsquo andlsquo(the) Republicansrsquo MGC speakers more often inhabit the role of the outside observerthan HPC speakers do we should expect that MGC speakersrsquo the-s will generally beas high as or higher than those of HPC speakers Methods This study centered on the eight pundits (including McLaughlin) who ap-

peared on at least twenty-five of the MGCrsquos 154 episodes Participantsrsquo political lean-ings were determined based on their careers self-descriptions and political statementsand categorized based on the basic if imperfect conservative asymp Republican and liberalasymp Democrat dichotomy (Saad 2015)9

For each participant every token of (the) Democrats and (the) Republicans was col-lected excluding tokens for which the head noun was modified for the sake of compa-rability Tokens were identified by hand I retained tokens for which the DP of interest


9 Here is a snapshot of each speakerrsquos political profile Michael Barone American Enterprise Institute fel-low Washington Examiner analyst Tony Blankley Press secretary to Newt Gingrich (1990s) Pat BuchananSought Republican presidential nomination 1992 1996 Larry Kudlow Author of Bullish on Bush (Kudlow2014) John McLaughlin Part of Nixon and Ford administrations (Maltin 2005np) Eleanor Clift Bill andHillary Clinton supporter (Clift 2008np) Lawrence OrsquoDonnell Self-described socialist but lsquoas much acapitalist as a socialistrsquo (OrsquoDonnell 2011np) Clarence Page lsquo[F]actory-town liberalrsquo (Page 2014np)

was the object of the word of provided that either variant would be grammatical in thecontext (eg a lot of (the) Democrats) Excluding such tokens does not change the re-sults in any appreciable way Quotative uses were excluded and the-s were calculatedfor each speakerResults As shown in Table 3 the use of the-plurals patterns according to onersquos

closer political party in seven of the eight speakers and on the aggregate by party


participant closer dem rep dem N rep N Lower the- party the- the- for closer party

Barone R 674 500 46 36 yesBlankley R 827 536 75 84 yesBuchanan R 714 667 14 36 yesKudlow R 625 563 16 16 yesMcLaughlin R 528 456 199 204 yesClift D 604 622 106 148 yesOrsquoDonnell D 474 455 19 22 noPage D 286 667 14 15 yesCloser to Republican 623 503 350 376 yesCloser to Democratic 554 605 139 185 yes

Table 3 The-s for MGC participants ordered by political leaning and surname

In addition as expected given MGC punditsrsquo role as outside observers the-s arehigher on average in this corpus than in the HPC as shown in Table 4 Aggregating bycloser party and party term we see that the the- is at least six percentage points higherin the MGC than in the HPC across the board The effect is especially clear when speak-ers talk about their own partymdashin both cases the average the- for the party closer tothe speaker is more than 24 percentage points higher in the MGC

closer party corpus dem rep differential the- the- (abs value)

Republican HPC 533 261 272MGC 623 503 120difference minus90 minus242 152

Democratic HPC 304 544 240MGC 554 605 51difference minus250 minus61 189

Table 4 Comparison of aggregate the-s in the HPC and MGC

Also as expected given pressures for MGC pundits to display a degree of objectivityand nonpartisanship the aggregate the- differential for a given party is far narrower inthe MGC than in the HPC In fact as shown in Table 4 this differential in the HPC ismore than double that in the MGC for both parties on the aggregatemdash272 versus120 for Republicansconservatives and 240 versus 51 for Democratsliberals

Evidence of expectations of objectivity can be found in the corpus itself as in 20 (20) MCLAUGHLIN hellip Have the Republicans already out-strategized the Dem-

ocrats Tony BlankleyBLANKLEY In the interest of honest journalism I donrsquot think wersquove out-

strategized the Democrats since 1994 However I think the Republicansare sort of stumbling into a defensible position hellip So I think while wehavenrsquot out-strategized the Democrats wersquore in a pretty useful position

MCLAUGHLIN Why do you keep saying lsquowersquo [Laughter] Are you identi-fying yourself with Republicans now [hellip] [hellip Y]ou are an analytic jour-

nalist Yoursquore like Pat Buchanan and Pat would never identify himself asbeing a Republicanmdasha lsquowersquo10

Despite an initial gesture toward objectivity (lsquoIn the interest of honest journalismrsquo)conservative Tony Blankley personalizes his statement in talking about Republicans aslsquowersquo McLaughlin makes fun of Blankleyrsquos usage as falling outside the standards of analytic journalism pointing to panelist Pat Buchanan as a shining example of appro-priate usage Indeed McLaughlin seems to be onto something Blankleyrsquos the- differ-ential for the two party terms is the highest of all of the conservative participants at291 whereas Buchananrsquos at 47 is the lowest (see Table 3)

In light of the clear pressure toward journalistic objectivity it is not surprising to findthat participantsrsquo the- differentials in the MGC were on average far narrower thanthose in the HPC 33 Summary The findings of these studies clearly converge in support of the no-

tion that the-plurals particularly relative to BPs have a distancing monolithizing ef-fect The vast majority of speakers in both corpora had a lower the- for the party theyare closer to than for the other And on the aggregate speakers in the MGC had farhigher the-s for both party terms (reflective of their status as outside observers) andnarrower the- differentials (reflective of pressures to exhibit objectivity) The nega-tive correlation between the-plurals and cooperative commingling language furthersuggests that the-plurals depict their referents as separate monoliths

Before I provide an account for these patterns it is worth emphasizing that the fore-going findings concerning political party terms are an instantiation of what is predictedto be a more general pattern where ceteris paribus being a member of a group or hav-ing an affinity for that group makes one more likely to opt for a BP over a the-plural innaming that group and vice versa This same general prediction leads us to expect forinstance that pundits in the MGC all being US citizens would be less likely to use athe-plural in referring to Americans than in referring to people from regions outside ofthe US As one striking example the the- across all pundits in the MGC for the termAmericans is 101 (n = 99) whereas for Russians it is 938 (n = 81)

By the same logic if we expect two distinct groups of individuals to bear a similar re-lation to some third group we should likewise expect their the-s in naming that thirdgroup to be similar ceteris paribus For instance perhaps there is less of a differencebetween Democratic and Republican representatives in their orientation to voters ingeneral than in their orientation to Democrats If so thenmdashholding all other factorsfixedmdashwe should in turn expect the two partiesrsquo the-s for the term voters in the HPCto be closer than their the-s for the term Democrats11 By the same token differencesin the-s for the two parties for a particular group term could well indicate interpartydifferences in orientation to the group itself In this way data concerning an individualor grouprsquos the-s for a range of plural terms may provide clues for mapping out that in-dividual or grouprsquos social positioning and attitudes At the same time such data must beinterpreted with caution given the multitude of factors influencing determiner choice


10 July 10 1998 episode of The McLaughlin Group first aired July 11 1998 From transcript posted athttpwwwmclaughlincomtranscripthtmid=40 last accessed July 1 2016

11 It appears that this prediction is indeed borne out in the HPC Whereas the the- differential betweenDemocrats and Republicans in the HPC for the term Democrats is about 23 percentage points a preliminaryanalysis indicates that the corresponding value for the term voters is well under 10 More work is needed toensure that the data upon which the latter number is based include only tokens of voters that have no pre- orpostnominal modifier

Pursuing that line of inquiry must be left for future research In what remains hereinI show that the distancing monolithizing meanings documented above are not acciden-tal but can be derived from the semantic properties of the-plurals and related expres-sions considered in the light of general pragmatic principles

4 A sociopragmatic perspective The central phenomenon of interest in this workis a kind of nonentailed meaning In looking to explain the phenomenon then it makessense to seek answers in the subfields of linguistics most deeply concerned with nonen-tailed meaning namely pragmatics and sociolinguistics Both areas have illuminated agreat many phenomena and both will be of much help here Doing full justice to themeanings of interest however means expanding and connecting both lines of researchIn this section I provide a brief overview of what each tradition has to offer to the studyof nonentailed meaning focusing on matters that are particularly relevant to the presentcase Then drawing on and further developing that discussion I present a socioprag-matic account of the phenomenon of interestmdashone that (i) in the spirit of pragmaticsties the core meanings of interest to principles of rational action and the semantics ofthe-plurals and related alternatives (sect5) and (ii) in the spirit of sociolinguistics ad-dresses the role of context variation and indexicality (sect6)41 A view from pragmatics Perhaps Gricersquos greatest contribution to the study of

meaning is the idea that much of what is conveyed by an utterance is not entailed butrather arises from considering an observed utterance in relation to related alternative ut-terances and general principles guiding language use Underlying this perspective arethe principles in 21

(21) Language users (whether consciously or not)a Have context-sensitive expectations about what makes for a normal or ap-

propriate utterance (eg Grice 1975 Brown amp Levinson 1987 Keller1994 Traugott 2011)

b Attempt to optimize the cost-benefit ratio of their utterances ceterisparibus (eg Horn 2004 Sperber amp Wilson 2004 Goodman amp Frank2016)

c Appeal to reason and take 21ab into account in forming and interpretingutterances (eg Grice 1975 Horn 1984)

The degree to which language users consider or enact these principles consciously iscertainly open to investigation At a minimum however the idea is that language usersrsquobehavior tends to square with these principles (Of course when such principles are notin force familiar pragmatic phenomena like implicature cease (Horn 20047ndash8)) It isbut a short step from these principles to the following very general dynamic which insome form or another (though not necessarily in the following terms) lies at the founda-tion of much pragmatic research on nonentailed meaningmdashincluding the present study

Given an utterance u whenever one may assume that 21b is in force it follows thatthere is no alternative utterance α such that the speaker believed that α would offer abetter mix of costs and benefits than u in the context of utterance Now if from the per-spective of an observer of u there is some αʹ that on the face of things appears that itmight offer an appreciably better mix of costs and benefits than u for the speaker thissuggests room for improvement in the observerrsquos model of the speakerrsquos beliefs goalsand so onmdashotherwise it would be plainly obvious why the speaker preferred u to αʹ Inturn inasmuch as the observer wishes to reconcile their belief state with what they ob-serve they have an incentive to attempt to infer (consciously or not) why the speakerdid indeed prefer u to αʹ Furthermore it stands to reason that the more favorable αʹ


appears to be relative to u prima facie in the context of utterance the more likely it is toreceive such consideration ceteris paribusmdashfor the more favorable αʹ appears to be rel-ative to u the more explanation is needed concerning why it was not used instead

We may distill these very general dynamics to the very general principles in 22 (Notefor present purposes I intend to use the term alternative utterance in the broadest pos-sible sense something that might have been said instead of the observed utterance)

(22) Let u be an utterance issued by speaker S and heard by hearer h in context Cand suppose that h assumes that S attempted to optimize the cost-benefitratio of u Then insofar as h wishes to reconcile their own beliefs with thespeakerrsquos utterancea Reconciliation If given an alternative utterance α it is not obvious to

h why S would have preferred u to α in C h will have reason to try toinfer why S used u and not α12

b Weighing alternatives The better the mix of costs and benefits an al-ternative α appears to h to have relative to u in C the more likely h is todraw an inference concerning Srsquos nonuse of α ceteris paribus

The intent of 22 here is to lay out in the most general terms why language users enrichutterances vis-agrave-vis alternatives and why some alternatives are more likely than othersto figure in such enrichment Such principles as we will see are the very foundation ofthe core social meanings of interest in the present work

At the same time however 22 does not itself tell the whole story largely because itdoes not speak to the question of what aspects of utterances tend to be viewed as bene-ficial or costly Fortunately previous pragmatic research offers a great deal in answer-ing that very question For Grice (1975) for instance trying to optimize an utterancersquoscosts and benefits more specifically means attempting to select the maximally lsquocooper-ativersquo utterancemdashthat is one that is based on sound evidence (quality) is appro -priately informative (quantity and relation) and is clear and concise (manner)Considering a classic case suppose a speaker says lsquosomersquo in a context in which lsquoallrsquowould have been relevant Given that lsquoallrsquo is just as relevant and more informative in thecontext without being any less clear or concise it may appear prima facie to be morecooperative (to offer a better cost-benefit ratio) than lsquosomersquo By 22 this naturally raisesthe question of why the speaker did not say lsquoallrsquo The speaker is assumed to be trying toprovide the lsquobestrsquo (in this case maximally cooperative) utterance so there must besome reason for their avoiding lsquoallrsquo One leading possibility is that saying lsquoallrsquo wouldhave meant saying something the speaker believed to be false violating the qualitymaximmdashhence the possible lsquonot allrsquo inference

Similarly in subsequent pragmatic research the benefit of an utterance is most typi-cally taken to be the amount of relevant information it encodes and on the assumptionthat we try to conserve effort (in terms of retrieval production and processing) costsare usually determined in terms of the utterancersquos markedness (Horn 1984 Levinson2000 Sperber amp Wilson 2004 inter alia see Horn 2004 for a useful review) As I showin sect5 this perspective provides the key ingredients needed to explain the core meaningsof interest in this work

In the meantime it is worth noting that this focus on what Grice (197547) calls lsquoamaximally effective exchange of informationrsquo has generally also meant focusing onnonentailed meanings that directly enrich an utterancersquos entailments concerning the sit-


12 I should also add here the condition that the hearer believes that u and α are distinct enough from eachother that using one over the other would have nontrivial consequences

uation being described and the identity of the referents involved (though see researchon politeness eg Lakoff 1973 Brown amp Levinson 1987 et seq for exceptions)

But of course conveying propositional descriptive content is not the only function oftalking Concerning the effects of interest here for instance we find a different casewhere the potential inferences are more focused on characterizing discourse partici-pants (in this case the speaker) than on enriching the description of the situation underdiscussion (cf Pottsrsquos 2007 conception of expressive content) Consider again exam-ple 1a repeated here with one of its potential implicata as 23

(23) The Americans love cars +gt The speaker is not an American or wishes toexpress distance from Americans

Here the implicatum does not narrow the interpretation of the term Americans to somespecific kind of American or lead to a more specific interpretation of love or carsRather it says something about the speakermdashmore specifically about the speakerrsquos re-lation to the group under discussion Other recent studies (eg Davis amp Potts 2010Acton amp Potts 2014 Glass 2015 Beltrama amp Staum Casasanto 2017) similarly focuson meanings that speak to discourse participantsrsquo traits views or relations

Happily the general pragmatic perspective discussed in this section together withthe specific principles worked out in previous pragmatic research can in fact take usvery far in explaining both kinds of nonentailed meaning as I show in sect5 At the sametime doing justice to the nonentailed meanings of the-pluralsmdashnot to mention therange of nonentailed meanings at largemdashmeans for one thing more thoroughly incor-porating our understanding of variation indexical meanings (see below) context-dependence discourse norms and social and linguistic ideologies These domains havebeen matters of intense focus in sociolinguistics 42 A view from sociolinguistics Like pragmatics sociolinguistics has long

recognized nonentailed meaning Within sociolinguistics however the nonentailedmeanings of interest like the meanings of interest here generally concern discourseparticipantsrsquo traits stances and relations The primary focus has been on indexicalmeaning (Peirce 1955 Silverstein 2003 Eckert 2008)mdashessentially a given formrsquos as-sociations and connotationsmdashand its relation to language variation and change Thissense of indexical is different from but related to the use of the term in reference to se-mantically context-sensitive expressions like I here and now In essence forms accu-mulate associations with features of the contexts in which they are observed includinginformation concerning speakersrsquo stances traits and the like The form then lsquopointsrsquo tothese stances traits and so on hence the term indexical

Now when a form bears indexical meaning it can then be used to send signals tied tothat meaning Different individuals occupying different places in social space and hav-ing different goals are variably likely to desire to send particular signals and thereforeto use particular forms to varying degrees The indexical meaning of a form thus helpsexplain variation in its use (Eckert 2008 2012) And with each new use a form accruesnew associations thereby shifting its significance and social utility

Variationist research rooted in this perspectivemdashwhat Eckert (2012) calls the lsquothirdwaversquo of variationist researchmdashin fact has much in common at a foundational level withthe pragmatic perspectives discussed above Third-wave studies like pragmatic studiestreat language users as purposive agents who speak in service of their goals consistentwith 21 and 22 (see eg Burnett 2017) As Eckert (201297ndash98) puts it lsquopatterns of vari-ation do not simply unfold from the speakerrsquos structural position in a system of produc-tion but are part of the activemdashstylisticmdashproduction of social differentiationrsquo as


observed for example in Kieslingrsquos (1998) study of lsquofraternity brothers using apicalvariants of -ing to invoke powerrsquo (Eckert 201295ndash96)

Both pragmatics and third-wave variationism thus seek to document and explain howlanguage users employ semiotic resources to serve their goals That said third-wavevariationism offers distinct perspectives and insights to the present study and to prag-matic research more generally First and perhaps foremost as a matter of defining prin-ciple third-wave variationism foregrounds the connection between differences inmeaning and patterns of use as in the study presented in this work Second while prag-matics research often (though certainly not without exception) focuses on relatively ro-bust nonentailed meanings that tend lsquoto go through unless a special context is presentrsquo(Horn 20045) for variationist sociolinguistics context and variation are the sine quanon Accordingly the latter has greatly illuminated the thoroughgoing context-sensitiv-ity of nonentailed meaning Campbell-Kibler (2007) for instance examining the En-glish -ing suffix found systematic variation in individualsrsquo interpretations of the -inrsquovariant which can suggest relaxedness laziness or even pretentiousness depending onfeatures of the speakerrsquos utterance the addresseersquos beliefs the speakerrsquos traits and soon Similarly Podesva (2007489) shows that while the social meaning of falsetto maycenter on a lsquocore expressive meaningrsquo its particularized meaning and function on agiven occasion depend heavily on the linguistic and extralinguistic context As demon-strated above and discussed further in sect6 this is certainly the case with the-pluralswhich may figure in an act of othering in one case (as in 6) lend an air of objectivity tothe speaker in another (as in the MGC) and have more to do with presenting the groupof interest as a bloc than with separating the speaker from that group in yet another (asin 2 18 and 19)

Third-wave variationism also complements pragmatics in its focus on indexicalmeanings As I suggest below concerning loaded expressions like the blacks evenwhere a given nonentailed meaning is largely rooted in context-insensitive aspects ofmeaning indexicality still has a role to play in explaining why particular instances ofparticular expressions get particular distinctive interpretations

With these perspectives in mind in sect5 I present an account of the phenomenon of in-terest here The basic strategy will be to recruit insights from pragmatics to derive thecore social meanings of interestmdashnamely the distancing and monolithizing effect ofusing the-pluralsmdashand explain why these meanings are less likely to arise with BPsThen in sect6 drawing on insights from the variationist sociolinguistics tradition I dis-cuss the crucial role of context and indexicality in how the-plurals are interpreted

Before turning to the account it bears emphasis that I do not assume that the accountpresents procedures that language users consciously follow in real time Rather at aminimum the account presents a rationality-based explanation of why the social mean-ings of interest tend to obtain I leave as an open question the degree to which the mean-ings are already indexicalized

5 Deriving the core meanings of interest 51 Which alternatives In accordance with the pragmatic perspective outlined

in sect41 the core meanings of interest will be derived by considering the-plurals vis-agrave-vis alternative expressions that one might otherwise have thought might offer thespeaker a better mix of costs and benefits The first question in deriving the core mean-ings of interest then is which potential alternatives appear to offer rich benefits at lowcosts relative to the-plurals

As noted in sect41 previous pragmatic research has gotten a great deal of mileage outof analyzing benefits in terms of the amount of relevant information an expression en-


codes and costs in terms of markedness With that in mind the very general principle in22b typically takes on the form of some version of the more specific (neo-)Griceanprinciple in 24

(24) Weighing alternatives v2 ((neo-)gricean) Given an utterance u issuedby a speaker S in a context C A hearer is likely to draw an inference con-cerning the speakerrsquos nonuse of α insofar as it appears that α might offer abetter mix of relevant information (benefit) and markedness (cost)

In the spirit of 24 it stands to reason that much research in the (neo-)Gricean traditionhas centered on alternatives that given an observed utterance u encode strictly morerelevant information than u but are no (or not considerably) more marked and thosethat are strictly less marked but encode no (or not considerably) less relevant informa-tion This is the nature of Levinsonrsquos 2000 Q-principle and M-principle and Katzirrsquos2007 conversational principle for instance and it serves our present purposes wellas I show shortly

What I have referred to here in general terms as markedness is operationalized in dif-ferent ways depending on the theory For Katzir (2007) it is operationalized as struc-tural complexity so that given any two expressions φ and ψ ψ is no more complex thanφ if and only if lsquowe can transform φ into ψ by a finite series of deletions contractionsand replacements of constituents in φ with constituents of the same categoryrsquo (Katzir2007679) and ψ is strictly less complex than φ if the quoted criterion is satisfied butthe reverse is not13 Considering a DP of the form the Xs this means that any grammat-ical expression of the form (Det) + Xs will be no more marked than the Xs Of particu-lar interest here this includes expressions of the form we Xs (we-plurals) and the BP Xsthe latter of which is strictly less marked As I show below the availability of these al-ternatives is central to the social meanings of interest

Other theories offer more complex notions of markedness that include additional con-siderations Levinsonrsquos (2000) theory for instance includes not only structural com-plexity but also (in)frequency among other things There is indeed a good argument tobe made that we -plurals being relatively infrequent are at least somewhat more markedthan the Xs In any case because of the role of structural complexity in Levinsonrsquos sys-tem there is still a wider gap in markedness between BPs and we-plurals than betweenthe-plurals and we-plurals In turn thinking in terms of the markedness side of 24 onboth Levinsonrsquos theory and Katzirrsquos theory we should expect that we-plurals wouldsooner figure in the interpretation of the-plurals than in the interpretation of BPs

As for informativity on the interpretations of interest neither we-plurals nor BPs areany less informative than the-plurals As noted at the outset the uses of the Xs of inter-est are those for which the expression is used to say something about all or typical in-stantiations of a particular group or kind of individuals In such statements BPs andthe-plurals can generally be used without leading to any dramatic differences in truthconditions as in 25

(25) a Americans do love carsb The Americans do love cars

Both examples in 25 attribute car loving to all or typical Americans both allow for someexceptions and so on Furthermore assuming an all-or-typical interpretation the paral-


13 Though see Katzir 2007n 11 on making allowances for additional markedness considerations

lel example in 26 is no less specific in its truth conditions and as I discuss further in sect52it is in fact more informative than the examples in 25 in terms of presuppositions14

(26) We Americans do love carsTaking all of this together what we have in Xs and we Xs are alternatives to the Xs

that are respectively (i) strictly less marked without being less informative and (ii)strictly more informative without being hugely (or on Katzirrsquos 2007 account any)more marked

There are of course other alternatives one might consider that would fit the samebill Nevertheless given the nature of the effect I do not discuss here such alternatives(eg generic demonstratives Bowdle amp Ward 1995) though the availability of theseexpressions as alternatives does add interesting subtleties to the picture For more onthe relations between these various kinds of expression see Acton 2014

In the spirit of the Gricean principles in sect41 the core meanings of interest are de-rived by considering why a speaker might prefer to use a the-plural over a BP or a we-plural Let us therefore take a closer look at what sets these expressions apart from eachother semantically with an eye toward identifying the potential advantages and disad-vantages that come with using them52 The encoded meaning and form of the relevant expressionsThE The work of the in its plural uses is to pick out particular collections of object-

level individuals15 Following Sharvy (1980) Wolter (2006) Elbourne (2008 2013)and Acton (2014) inter alia I take the semantics of the to be a function that takes aproperty P and returns the function that maps a given situation s to the maximum indi-


14 It is worth pointing out that in addition to having all-or-typical readings 25b and 26 are amenable toreadings for which the subjects denote a particular proper subset of Americans One referee notes for in-stance that lsquo(ia) and (ib) could be uttered by an individual at an international conference to communicate thatjust the Americans at the conference are arrogant (ic) on the other hand can only be heard as a statementabout Americans in generalrsquo

ii(i) a The Americans are arrogant b We Americans are arrogant c Americans are arrogant

Thus the-plurals and we-plurals where an all-or-typical interpretation is intended are susceptible to misin-terpretation in a way that BPs are not If following Grice (1975) and his manner maxim one takes an utter-ancersquos utility to vary directly with its perspicuity (ceteris paribus and assuming a desire to communicateclearly) one could thus further argue that where the goal is to make an all-or-typical statement the suscepti-bility of the-plurals and we-plurals to this kind of misinterpretation adds to their markednessundesirabilityrelative to BPs If this is so it only further strengthens the account of the distancing and monolithizing effectsof the-plurals developed in sect54 which relies on the-plurals being more marked than BPs in all-or-typicalstatements In any case the account does not depend on there being this extra source of markedness for the-plurals since as already established they are already more marked than BPs given their greater structuralcomplexity See sect53 for additional discussion

15 Although its object-level use is overwhelmingly more common the can also be used in referring to tax-onomic kinds Such reference is (as the name suggests) highly associated with scientific discourse and resistspredication involving nonessential properties (Dayal 2004) Talk about humans as taxonomic kinds thus oftenborders on comical or condescending as in (i)

ii(i) The American (a most curious creature) loves carsSuch uses like the relevant uses of the-plurals also suggest distance between the speaker and the relevantgroupmdashbut given the relative markedness of the former and their associations with scientific discourse theyare arguably even more distancing

Also on the topic of the-singulars a referee points out that object-level uses of the with proper names like theGoogle or the Facebook can suggest a lsquo ldquonaiumlve older personrdquo personarsquo Whether this is best attributed to mis-naming relatively recent technology or to something about the specifically (or both) must await future work

vidual satisfying P in s (where defined) For plurals this means the plural individualcomprised of all atomic individuals satisfying P in s (Link 1983)mdashor equivalently forour purposes the set of all individuals satisfying P in smdashas a collective For instancethe encoded meaning of the dogs where defined maps a given situation s to the collec-tion of all dogs in s

Importantly in picking out particular well-defined collections of individuals as aunit the-plurals draw boundary lines in the domain of discourse and in turn can fore-ground questions of who is and is not part of the group in question First-person forms First-person forms also definitively pick out object-level indi-

viduals Unlike the-plurals however the speech-act agent (generally the speaker) fig-ures directly in their propositional meaning As a first approximation we maps asituation to the speaker and some contextually relevant group of associated individualsin that situation Complicating things only slightly is the fact that we like the can takean NP sister as in we Americans Moreover Nunberg (1993) points out some importantintricacies associated with we that suggest a need for a more complex formulation Gen-eralizing to the lsquoworst casersquo one can say that where defined we takes an optional prop-erty P argument and returns a function that maps a situation s to the collection of allindividuals in s that satisfy P and some contextually determined property borne by thespeech-act agent (nearly always the speaker) (Acton 2014)

Thus assuming an all-or-typical interpretation both the-plurals and we-plurals ulti-mately contribute the same collection of individuals to the proposition being expressedbut we-plurals are strictly more informative than the-plurals in their presuppositionsonly the former presuppose that the speech-act agent instantiates the relevant propertyAs explained more fully below in this contrast we have the germ of the distancing ef-fect of the-plurals The central question however is not only why the-plurals tend to in-vite such an inference but also why they are more likely to do so than BPs and whythey are more likely to present the relevant group of individuals as a monolith Thistakes us to the encoded meaning of BPs Bare plurals The crucial semantic difference between BPs and the-plurals for our

purposes is that unlike the-plurals BPs do not definitively pick out particular collec-tions of object-level individuals In turn they neither draw definitive dividing lines inthe domain of discourse nor foreground who is in or out of a particular group

Let us consider the three basic types of BP interpretations (eg Farkas amp de Swart2007) as exemplified in 27ndash29

(27) Dogs arenrsquot extinct kind-level(28) Dogs bark when threatened characterizing(29) Dogs are barking episodic (Dayal 2013 ex 5c)

Kind-level interpretations like extinct in 27 involve predicates that lsquodo not apply toregular individuals like John and Fido but only to speciesrsquo (Farkas amp de Swart20071659) That is such BPs pick out kinds of things rather than the things (object-level individuals) themselves Indeed on Chierchiarsquos (1998) and Dayalrsquos (2004) ac-counts object-level individuals never enter the picture on kind-level interpretationsrather the interpretation comes from the application of a kind operator to the propertyencoded by the BP

Characterizing sentences like 28 differ from sentences like 27 in that their mainpredicate is not kind-level but object-level Many semantic accounts of characterizingsentences involve abstract quantification over individuals or situations via a generic op-erator so that the denotation of 28 is something like 30 where Gen is the relevant op-erator (see eg Papafragou 1996 for discussion)


(30) Gensx (dogʹ(x)(s) amp threatenedʹ(x)(s)) (barksʹ(x)(s)) (cf Farkas amp de Swart 2007)

The interpretation of 28 then is something like lsquoTypically in a situation involving athreatened dog the dog will barkrsquo While various accounts of characterizing sentencesdiffer in their details they are all alike in that the BP ultimately contributes a propertyto the proposition Thus BPs do not deliver a well-defined collection of object-level in-dividuals in characterizing sentences either

Lastly are episodic sentences like 29 which rather than making a general claimabout typical instantiations of the relevant kind or property describe a particular situa-tion On most accounts of sentences like 29 (eg Chierchia 1998 Krifka 2003) the sen-tence ends up with an existential interpretationmdashso that 29 is interpreted as somethinglike lsquoThere are some dogs barkingrsquo Even on Dobrovie-Sorinrsquos (2009) analysis wherebare plurals denote sums of individuals the precise makeup of the relevant sum remainsindeterminate so that dogs in 29 lsquorefersrsquo not to a particular fully determined sum of in-dividual dogs but rather to some nonminimal nonmaximal sum of individual dogs

Worth specific mention are those episodic BP sentences that lack an indefinite feelsuch as 31 for which 33 seems a better paraphrase than 32

(31) Californians voted three-to-one in favor of the measure (32) There were some Californians who voted three-to-one in favor of the measure(33) Among Californians who voted three in four voted in favor of the measure

Krifka (2003198ndash99) discusses similar examples analyzing the relevant BPs as ulti-mately denoting kinds Dayal (2013) by contrast claims that an episodic sentence ofthe form BP + predicate is true in s just in case the predicate holds of some representa-tive subpart of the collection of all individuals who instantiate the relevant kind in somesituation sʹ where s lt sʹ

Again on neither account do such BPs definitively pick out particular object-levelindividuals Instead they involve a lack of particularity as evidenced in exchanges suchas 34 where the respondent exploits this property in an act of evasion

(34) Parent And who is going to this partyRecalcitrant teenager People

On all of their various interpretations then BPs do not definitively pick out a collec-tion of object-level individuals and are crucially less determinate than the-plurals53 The markedness of definites in all-or-typical statements In each of the

variants in 25 and 26 repeated here as 35 and 36 the truth conditions are in essence thesame on an all-or-typical interpretationmdashall three convey that a given American willtypically love cars or something like that


(36) We Americans do love carsWith regard to considerations of structural complexity (Levinson 2000 Katzir 2007

inter alia) it is no wonder that the-plurals (and we-plurals) are relatively marked in all-or-typical statements given that BPs achieve the same basic truth-conditional endsthrough less costly means16 Indeed in many cases the-plurals are so marked for all-or-


16 A referee rightly points out that one might argue that structurally speaking BPs are as complex as the-plurals The argument is that BPs include a phonologically null determiner in the form of a Kind type-shifterGen or some other operator However even if this is the right structural analysis for BPs the standard in thepragmatics literature which I adopt here is to treat overt morphological material as contributing more to the formal markedness of an expression than any potential covert material (see eg Horn 200416ndash17) and

typical statements that unlike BPs they strongly default to a particularized interpreta-tion Consider the minimal pairs in 37 and 38

(37) a Cats love tuna fishb The cats love tuna fish

(38) a I love catsb I love the cats

In both pairs the (a) sentences lend themselves to an all-or-typical interpretation suchthat the speaker is saying something about cats in general In contrast the (b) sentencesmost naturally lend themselves to interpretations whereby the speaker is saying some-thing about a particular collection of catsmdashthe cats they own the cats they are pet-sit-ting or some other salient collection of cats The same goes for a wide range ofthe-plurals they tend to be evaluated relative to situations smaller than entire worlds orother macrosituations (Consider books vs the books windows vs the windows elec-trons vs the electrons etc) That we default to a particularized reading for many the-plurals is perhaps unsurprising from a pragmatic perspective it is reasonable for ahearer to suspect that a speaker using a the-plural intends to communicate somethingthat a BP which is less costly could not or would not

Of course certain the-plurals are relatively amenable to all-or-typical interpreta-tionsmdashparticularly those the-plurals whose constituent NPs correspond to groups whosemembers are frequently talked about in collective terms such as sports teams (the Detroit Tigers) nations (the Italians) or political parties (the Whigs) Still given theavailability of less costly BPs it is clear that the-plurals are relatively marked in all-or-typical statements17

54 Deriving the core meanings of interest Sections 2 and 3 provided exten-sive support for the claim that using a the-plural to talk about all or typical members ofa group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith separate from thespeaker and to an extent that using a BP does not The remaining question is why thisshould be

To illustrate the dynamics involved consider a scenario in which a group of atten-dees at an international conference are dining together Bauer a European remarks onthe great number of automobiles in the United States Jones whose nationality is un-known (Jonesrsquos accent suggests Canadian or US citizenship) responds with either 35aor 35b Let us take each in turn beginning with 35b Scenario one ThE AMERICANS In this case the speaker has used 35b (The Americans

do love cars) Being a relatively marked choice it may raise the question of why it waspreferred to other potential utterances As discussed in sect51 (neo-)Gricean research fur-nishes 35a (Americans) and 36 (we Americans) as two clear candidates for alternativesthat might appear to offer a better mix of costs and benefits and with good reason 35abecause it is no less informative than the actual utterance while being considerably lessmarked and 36 because it is more informative in its presuppositions (entailing that thespeech-act agent is an American) without being much more marked Returning to the


the same goes for optimality-theoretic research on the nominal domain such as de Swart amp Zwarts 2009 (I thank this same referee for pointing me to this latter work) Hence even if they are indeed comparable instructural complexity BPs are still less formally marked than the-plurals

17 There is in addition an argument to be made that the fact that the-plurals unlike BPs can receive a par-ticularized definite interpretation or an all-or-typical interpretation further adds to their markedness where anall-or-typical interpretation is intended See n 14 In any event as noted there the account developed heredoes not depend on there being this extra source of markedness for the-plurals

general Gricean principle in 22a the remaining question is why the speaker mightnonetheless prefer 35b to those alternatives

Concerning alternatives that encode additional relevant information but are not con-siderably (or even better any) more marked the typical pragmatic line is that not usingsuch alternatives signals that using them would come at the cost of saying somethingfalse or insufficiently evidenced (see eg Hornrsquos 1984 and Levinsonrsquos 2000 Q-implica-tures and Katzirrsquos 2007 lsquoconversational principlersquo) The spirit of the present account ofthe distancing effect is the same but the focus here is on felicity rather than truth condi-tions Let us assume that the hearers believe that Jones has full knowledge of her own na-tionality and that information about her nationality would be deemed relevant With 35bJones has used a relatively marked form (cf 35a) but not 36 which is more informativewithout being any more structurally marked Following the line above then one obvi-ous reason to forgo 36 would be because it would come at the cost of saying somethinglsquofalsersquo or more precisely infelicitous That is a hearer might well conclude that Jonesforwent the apparent benefits of saying lsquowe Americansrsquo because it would have resultedin a presupposition failuremdashin particular because the speaker is not an American18

This particular calculation includes the assumption that the speaker would indeedfind it beneficial to provide the information that she is an American were it true Wecould just as well relax the assumption of Gricean cooperativity and in turn the as-sumption that modulo considerations of markedness Jones will share all relevant in-formation with her audience In that case a hearer might conclude not that Jones is notan American but that if she is she does not think it would benefit her to share that in-formation Either way given the availability of the unused alternative we Americanswe very naturally come to the potential inference that the speaker either is not an Amer-ican or does not want to make it known that she ismdashhence the distancing effect

This takes us to the other alternative of interest 35a (Americans) which has essen-tially the same truth conditions as 35b on an all-or-typical interpretation Encounteringlsquothe Americansrsquo one might reasonably ask why the speaker would incur the extramarkedness cost of the definite determiner the if doing so does not materially changethe truth conditions of the utterance What benefit might a the-plural offer that wouldmake the optional determiner worth using

One potential answer goes back to the consideration just discussed the availability ofa less marked determiner-free BP where a the-plural is used highlights the nonuse ofanother determinermdashnamely wemdashthe latter of which specifically encodes the speech-


18 Christopher Kennedy (pc) notes that the-plurals seem to tend toward an interpretation that excludes thespeaker not just in all-or-typical statements but in general He gives the example of a member of a univer-sityrsquos Department of Linguistics and Philosophy saying (i) regarding a faculty meeting Kennedyrsquos (defeasi-ble) default interpretation is that the speaker of (i) is a philosopher rather than a linguist

ii(i) (I think) the linguists would prefer to hold the meeting in room 101As with the case of 35b I claim that it is the competition between the linguists and first-person plurals like we(linguists) that yields this effect we (linguists) is more informative in terms of its presuppositions (semanti-cally including the speaker) without being more formally complex thus potentially offering a better mix ofcosts and benefits on the face of things and in turn potentially raising the question of why the speaker optedfor the linguists instead Again one plausible explanation is that using a first-person form would have in-volved the extra cost of saying something infelicitousmdashhence the potential inference that the speaker is not alinguist Of course the interpretation (i) would receive in context would depend on multiple factors includ-ing the knowledge of the hearer concerning who belongs to which group Also relevant here is the fact thatunlike in the case of all-or-typical statements replacing the the-plural with a BP yields a very different inter-pretation making BPs a less suitable alternative

act agentrsquos membership in the relevant group along the lines just discussed In this waythe availability of the BP Americans can strengthen the distancing effect

But there is something else that 35b offers the speaker that 35a does not Specificallywith its the-plural it delivers the set of all Americans as a collective and foregroundsthe boundary around that collective Inasmuch as the speaker would like to present theindividuals being discussed as a solid well-defined group this property of the-pluralsoffers a benefit to the speaker Thus encountering 35b a hearer might reasonably en-tertain the notion that Jones deliberately incurred the extra markedness cost of a the-plural to avail herself of this benefit and depict Americans as a monolithmdashhence themonolithizing effect

Again unlike in prototypical cases of implicature this effect is not so much about aspeakerrsquos desire to directly enrich the utterancersquos entailments concerning the situationbeing described or to help resolve reference Rather this effect like the distancing ef-fect involves an inference concerning the speakerrsquos view of and relation to the individ-uals under discussion Nonetheless the same general pragmatic principles underlyingfamiliar cases like scalar implicature explain these social meaningsScenario two AMERICANS In this case the result is rather different Let us first con-

sider the distancing effect In the previous scenario this effect was born of the contrastbetween the observed form and we Americans Here however the observed form is rel-atively unmarked so the gap in markedness between we Americans and the observedform is considerably greater Thus whereas vis-agrave-vis the Americans there is good rea-son to ask why the speaker did not opt for the more informative and structurally similarwe Americans here the larger gap in markedness provides a solid explanation in and ofitself the speaker may have avoided we Americans simply because it was not worth theconsiderable extra markedness cost In turn a hearer is less likely to conclude that say-ing lsquowe Americansrsquo would have been infelicitous or that the speaker is deliberatelywithholding information and in turn the distancing effect is less likely

As for the monolithizing effect again the gap in markedness between the Americansand Americans itself provides a rationale for opting for the latter over the formermdashleav-ing nothing to be explained Moreover even if in some context the Americans wereconsidered a relevant alternative to an observed use of Americans the contrast wouldnot engender a monolithizing effect For in that case the observed form is the one thatdoes not delimit a collective of individuals If anything opting for Americans wouldsignal that the speaker does not view the individuals being talked about as a monolith

Thus we have a principled explanation for the distancing and monolithizing effects ofthe-plurals and for why these effects are less likely to show up with BPs The dynamicsare rooted in general pragmatic principles and contrasts in the markedness and meaningof BPs the-plurals and first-person forms

The effect then is hardly accidental Indeed thinking crosslinguistically this accountpredicts that we should observe the same sort of effect in languages where BPs are thedefault form for all-or-typical statements but for which at least in certain circumstancesa definite plural may be so used My Swedish- and Dutch-speaking consultants confirmthat this is the case for their native languages so that the (b) sentences in 39 and 40 aremore likely than the (a) sentences to signal distance from the relevant group

(39) Swedisha Norsk-ar gillar skidaringkning

Norwegian-pl likeprs skiinglsquoNorwegians like skiingrsquo


b Norsk-ar-na gillar skidaringkningNorwegian-pl-def likeprs skiing

lsquoThe Norwegians like skiingrsquo(40) Dutch

a Belg-en zijn dol op frietBelgianm-pl beprspl crazy on fries

lsquoBelgians love friesrsquob De Belg-en zijn dol op friet

thenompl Belgianm-pl beprspl crazy on frieslsquoThe Belgians love friesrsquo

By the same token in languages where a definite marker is required in all-or-typicalstatements we should not expect to find so strong a distancing effect from phrasesheaded by that marker because in those languages there is not a briefer less marked al-ternative available

6 Context and related considerations61 Multiple possible interpretations Having said all of that while the prag-

matic approach taken here derives the core social meanings of interest it does not tell thefull story Perhaps most obviously as research in third-wave variationist sociolinguisticshas made abundantly clear the precise use to which a linguistic form is put and the pre-cise interpretation it actually receives varies from one context to the next As noted al-ready a the-plural may indeed signal speaker nonmembership as in 4 (repeated here as41) but in other cases it may have little at all to do with distancing and more to do withpresenting the group of interest as a unified front as in 2 18 and 19 (repeated here as42ndash44) That is the availability of more than one viable alternative (in this case BPs andfirst-person forms) means that there is more than one possible explanation for a speakerrsquosuse of a the-pluralmdasheither or both of which may be in play in a particular instance

(41) Paid for by Bernie 2016 (not the billionaires) (from US Senator Bernie Sandersrsquos presidential campaign website)


(from the website of the lsquoTea Party Patriotsrsquo)(43) The Democrats are united on the need for a new direction in Iraq

(John Larson (D-CT) 26 June 2006)(44) What the Republicans are going to stand against is tying the funds our sol-

diers need to do their jobs to benchmarks thought up by special interestgroups (Adrian Smith (R-NE) 9 March 2007)

Thus as in Podesvarsquos (2007) study of the social meaning of falsetto the ultimate inter-pretation depends importantly on what the purpose of the speech event is taken to bewhat the discourse participants already know about the speakerrsquos group membershipand attitudes and so on

As another example in the case of the MGC where presenting an air of journalisticobjectivity is particularly important first-person plural forms are more marked andtherefore more costly than in other situations Therefore ceteris paribus we should expect that using a the-plural in the MGC would be less likely to raise the question ofwhy the speaker did not use a first-person form than it would in another context wherefirst-person forms are not so costly In turn we should also predict that the inferencethat the speaker is not a member of the relevant group would be less likely in the MGCceteris paribus

Thus even if we concern ourselves only with semantic differences between the rele-vant expressions there will still be context-based variation in how a given the-plural


will be interpreted Then there is the issue of the role of indexicality and ideology in thesense discussed in sect42 to which I now turn62 Distancing and derogation Using a form that signals onersquos nonmembership

or downplays onersquos membership in a group is a way of putting distance between oneselfand that group It is tempting to assume that signaling distance in turn means deroga-tion In general it seems that we tend to mark distance between ourselves and thingswith which we do not wish to be associated

But sociolinguistic research on the role of indexicality context and ideology in in-terpretation (such as the work cited in sect42) cautions against assuming that such linkswill hold across all contexts After all derogation does not simply logically follow fromdistancing In fact marking distance is also a way of showing respect or deference Sil-versteinrsquos (2003) treatment of tuvous distinctions for instance centers on the notion ofdistance as do other accounts of formality in language Another particularly instructivecase concerns the expression the wife used to refer to onersquos own spouse (or in a paral-lel case the wife of an addressee) To my ear this formmdashwhich being in competitionwith forms like my wife clearly signals distance between speaker and spousemdashhas adistinctly derogatory tone Though not entailed this association between distance andderogation certainly figures in my interpretation of the wife In contrast however Ihave spoken with others who claim that in their social circles use of this phrase is justas likely to convey deference to onersquos spouse as it is to convey pejoration

Now if the social meaning of the wife were based strictly on reasoning over encodedmeaning then holding grammar fixed we would expect the social meaning to beroughly the same regardless of the speech community and situation in which it was beingused But this is not the case It must be then that the differences in interpretation havesome other source Drawing on the sociolinguistics literature the clearest candidates aredifferences in ideology and differences in previous experiences with the form (Eckert2008) which lead to differences in indexical meaning from one person to the next

The same holds for the derogation associated with the use of certain the-pluralsMarking distance does not entail a negative stance Instead it seems that signaling anegative stance with a the-plural though certainly related to distancing comes in partfrom ideology or associations with prior uses Presumably such is the case with loadedexpressions like the gays and the blacks which have repeatedly figured in statements ofpejoration and marginalization

Thus the analysis of the Americans and Americans presented in sect5 is only part of thepicturemdasha rather large and important part but a proper part nonetheless The precise in-terpretation of any particular BP or the-plural in a particular instance depends impor-tantly on the expressionrsquos indexical meaning for the speech participants which as acrucial part of what the form brings to the table enters into the dynamics outlined in sect5just as well as semantic content does If an addressee has repeatedly heard a form in pe-jorative statements one can bet that those pejorative associations will color their inter-pretation of the use at hand So too will their ideologies and many other factors besides

Still considering the encoded descriptive meaning of the-plurals and relevant alter-natives in the light of general pragmatic principles circumscribes the range of expectedinterpretations in a principled way Given the dynamics discussed above we should bevery surprised to find in any community that the-plurals are commonly used to signalspecial intimacy between the speaker and the group under discussion for instance

7 Conclusion The perspective taken herein thus offers principled explanations ofnonentailed meanings in the tradition of pragmatics while at the same time underscor-ing the role of context and linking patterns of variation to meaning in the tradition ofthird-wave variationist research This kind of perspective can be applied to a wide range


of phenomena (Acton 2014) Indeed a similar theme can be found running through abroadening array of recent studies on meanings concerning interlocutorsrsquo traits moodsstances and relationsmdashcovering other determiners (Davis amp Potts 2010 Acton amp Potts2014) modals (Glass 2015) and intensifiers (Beltrama amp Staum Casasanto 2017)

Eckert (2008) rightly points out that context variation and indexicality are inextrica-bly bound This work presents a picture whereby encoded semantic meaning is part ofthat same web of interrelations The pragmatic principles used to explain reference reso-lution and enrichments to situation descriptions can be extended to illumine the nature ofsocial meaning the very differences in meaning that one may be tempted to gloss over ina variationist study can in fact help explain the nature of the variation of interest

Practically speaking on the present view theories of semantic meaning together withpragmatic theory provide a basis for predictions about social meanings and patterns ofvariation By the same token observed social meanings and patterns of variation pro-vide data for semantic theories to reckon with Eckert (20114ndash5) is right lsquoThe bottomline is that it is time to integrate the study of variation with the study of meaning in lan-guage more generallyrsquo Semantics pragmatics and sociolinguistics need each other

REFERENCESAbbott Barbara 2008 Issues in the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions in

English Reference Interdisciplinary perspectives ed by Jeanette Gundel and NancyHedberg 61ndash72 Oxford Oxford University Press DOI 101093acprofoso97801953316390030003

Acton Eric K 2014 Pragmatics and the social meaning of determiners Stanford CAStanford University dissertation Online httppurlstanfordedusk702hj6068

Acton Eric K and Christopher Potts 2014 That straight talk Sarah Palin and the so-ciolinguistics of demonstratives Journal of Sociolinguistics 183ndash31 DOI 101111josl12062

Bates Douglas Martin Maumlchler Ben Bolker and Steve Walker 2015 Fitting lin-ear mixed-effects models using lme4 Journal of Statistical Software 671ndash48 DOI 1018637jssv067i01

Beltrama Andrea and Laura Staum Casasanto 2017 Totally tall sounds totallyyounger Intensification at the socio-semantics interface Journal of Sociolinguistics21154ndash82 DOI 101111josl12230

Birner Betty and Gregory Ward 1994 Uniqueness familiarity and the definite articlein English Berkeley Linguistics Society 2093ndash102 DOI 103765blsv20i11479

Bowdle Brian F and Gregory Ward 1995 Generic demonstratives Berkeley Linguis-tics Society 2132ndash43 DOI 103765blsv21i11396

Brown Penelope and Stephen C Levinson 1987 Politeness Some universals in lan-guage use Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Burnett Heather 2017 Sociolinguistic interaction and identity construction The viewfrom game-theoretic pragmatics Journal of Sociolinguistics 21238ndash71 DOI 101111josl12229

Cameron Richard and Scott Schwenter 2013 Pragmatics and variationist sociolin-guistics The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics ed by Robert Bayley RichardCameron and Ceil Lucas 464ndash83 Oxford Oxford University Press DOI 101093oxfordhb97801997440840130023

Campbell-Kibler Kathryn 2007 Accent (ing) and the social logic of listener percep-tions American Speech 8232ndash64 DOI 10121500031283-2007-002

Cheshire Jenny 2005 Syntactic variation and beyond Gender and social class variationin the use of discourse-new markers Journal of Sociolinguistics 9479ndash508 DOI 101111j1360-6441200500303x

Chierchia Gennaro 1998 Reference to kinds across languages Natural Language Se-mantics 6339ndash405 DOI 101023A1008324218506

Clift Eleanor 2008 The Hillary I know Newsweek March 8 2008 Online httpwwwnewsweekcomcliftthe-hillary-i-know-84083


Coppock Elizabeth and David Beaver 2012 Weak uniqueness The only difference be-tween definites and indefinites Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT)22527ndash44 DOI 103765saltv22i02651

Davies Mark 2008ndash The Corpus of Contemporary American English 520 million words1990ndashpresent Online httpcorpusbyueducoca

Davis Christopher and Christopher Potts 2010 Affective demonstratives and the di-vision of pragmatic labor Logic language and meaning 17th Amsterdam Colloquiumrevised selected papers ed by Maria Aloni Harald Bastiaanse Tikitu de Jager andKat rin Schulz 42ndash52 Berlin Springer DOI 101007978-3-642-14287-1_5

Dayal Veneeta 2004 Number marking and (in)definiteness in kind terms Linguisticsand Philosophy 27393ndash450 DOI 101023BLING00000244208032467

Dayal Veneeta 2013 On the existential force of bare plurals across languages Fromgrammar to meaning The spontaneous logicality of language ed by Ivano Caponigroand Carlo Cecchetto 49ndash80 Cambridge Cambridge University Press DOI 101017CBO9781139519328006

de Swart Henrieumltte and Joost Zwarts 2009 Less formmdashmore meaning Why baresingular nouns are special Lingua 119280ndash95 DOI 101016jlingua200710015

Djalali Alex J 2013 house Proceedings Corpus Stanford CA Stanford UniversityDobrovie-Sorin Carmen 2009 Existential bare plurals From properties back to entities

Lingua 119296ndash313 DOI 101016jlingua200710016 Eckert Penelope 2008 Variation and the indexical field Journal of Sociolinguistics 12

453ndash76 DOI 101111j1467-9841200800374x Eckert Penelope 2011 The future of variation studies Plenary talk given at New Ways of

Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 40 Georgetown University Online httpswebstanfordedu~eckertPDFFutureOFVariationpdf

Eckert Penelope 2012 Three waves of variation study The emergence of meaning in thestudy of variation Annual Review of Anthropology 4187ndash100 DOI 101146annurev-anthro-092611-145828

Elbourne Paul 2008 Demonstratives as individual concepts Linguistics and Philosophy31409ndash66 DOI 101007s10988-008-9043-0

Elbourne Paul 2013 Definite descriptions (Oxford studies in semantics and pragmat-ics) Oxford Oxford University Press

Farkas Donka F and Henrieumltte de Swart 2007 Article choice in plural generics Lin-gua 1171657ndash76 DOI 101016jlingua200606011

Glass Lelia 2015 Strong necessity modals Four socio-pragmatic corpus studies Univer-sity of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected papers from New Ways ofAnalyzing Variation 43) 2179ndash88 Online httprepositoryupennedupwplvol21iss210

Goodman Noah D and Michael C Frank 2016 Pragmatic language interpretation asprobabilistic inference Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20818ndash29 DOI 101016jtics201608005

Grice H Paul 1975 Logic and conversation Syntax and semantics vol 3 Speech actsed by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan 43ndash58 New York Academic Press

Horn Laurence R 1984 Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference Q-based andR-based implicature Meaning form and use in context Linguistic applications ed byDeborah Schiffrin 11ndash42 Washington DC Georgetown University Press

Horn Laurence R 2004 Implicature In Horn amp Ward 3ndash28Horn Laurence R and Gregory Ward (eds) 2004 handbook of pragmatics Oxford

Blackwell Hornaday Ann 2014 lsquoPridersquo revisits labor and gay politics in rsquo80s Britain Washington

Post October 8 2014 Accessed via Infotrac Newsstand July 11 2015 Johnson Daniel Ezra 2009 Getting off the GoldVarb standard Introducing Rbrul for

mixed-effects variable rule analysis Language and Linguistics Compass 3359ndash83DOI 101111j1749-818X200800108x

Katzir Roni 2007 Structurally-defined alternatives Linguistics and Philosophy 30669ndash90 DOI 101007s10988-008-9029-y

Keller Rudi 1994 On language change The invisible hand in language trans byBrigitte Nerlich London Routledge


Kiesling Scott F 1998 Menrsquos identities and sociolinguistic variation The case of frater-nity men Journal of Sociolinguistics 269ndash100 DOI 1011111467-948100031

Krifka Manfred 2003 Bare NPs Kind-referring indefinites both or neither Proceed-ings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13180ndash203 DOI 103765saltv13i02880

Kudlow Larry 2014 About Kudlow amp Company LLC Kudlow amp Company Onlinehttpkudlowcomaboutphp last accessed July 1 2016

Lakoff Robin 1973 The logic of politeness or minding your Prsquos and Qrsquos Chicago Lin-guistic Society 9292ndash305

Levinson Stephen C 2000 Presumptive meanings The theory of generalized conversa-tional implicature Cambridge MA MIT Press

Levy Roger 2015 Grammatical knowledge is fundamentally probabilistic Paper pre-sented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America Portland

Link Godehard 1983 The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms A lattice-theoreticalapproach Meaning use and interpretation of language ed by Rainer Bauumlerle Chris -toph Schwarze and Arnim von Stechow 302ndash23 Berlin Walter de Gruyter

Maltin Leonard 2005 John McLaughlin Turner Classic Movies Online httpwwwtcmcomtcmdbperson128201|0John-Mclaughlinbiographyhtml last accessed July1 2016

McAlley John 2009 Frankrsquos lsquoAmericansrsquo still revelatory after 50 years NPRorg Feb-ruary 13 2009 Online httpwwwnprorg20090213100673221franks-americans-still-revelatory-after-50-years last accessed April 14 2014

McLaughlin John (Producer) 1998ndash2001 The McLaughlin Group Chicago WTTWNational Productions

Nunberg Geoffrey 1993 Indexicality and deixis Linguistics and Philosophy 161ndash43DOI 101007BF00984721

OrsquoDonnell Lawrence 2011 Rewrite The Last Word MSNBC August 1 2011 Onlinehttpwwwnbcnewscomid2113454043980204 last accessed July 1 2016 (Alsocited on Wikipedia)

Outsidersrsquo chance 2016 The Economist January 30 2016 Online httpswwweconomistcombriefing20160130outsiders-chance last accessed July 2 2016

Page Clarence 2014 Pagersquos page The Chicago Tribune Online httpwwwchicagotribunecomnewsopinionpage last accessed May 20 2014

Papafragou Anna 1996 On generics UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 81ndash35 Peirce Charles Sanders 1955 Logic as semiotic The theory of signs Philosophical

writings of Peirce ed by Justus Buchler 98ndash119 New York Dover Books Placher William C 2009 How does Jesus save Christian Century In Davies 2008ndash Podesva Robert J 2007 Phonation type as a stylistic variable The use of falsetto in con-

structing a persona Journal of Sociolinguistics 11478ndash504 DOI 101111j1467-9841200700334x

Potts Christopher 2007 The expressive dimension Theoretical Linguistics 33165ndash97DOI 101515TL2007011

R Core Team 2012 R A language and environment for statistical computing Vienna RFoundation for Statistical Computing Online httpwwwR-projectorg

Republicans backed into a corner Alleged spy spills Chinese secrets to US A win for San-dusky 2012 Erin Burnett OutFront In Davies 2008ndash

Roberts Craige 2002 Demonstratives as definites Information sharing Reference andpresupposition in language generation and interpretation ed by Kees van Deemterand Roger Kibble 89ndash136 Stanford CA CSLI Publications

Robertson Campbell 2014 Among whites protests stir a range of emotions and a lot ofperplexity New York Times August 22 2014 Accessed via Infotrac Newsstand July11 2015

Romaine Suzanne 1984 On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory Folia Linguistica 18409ndash38 DOI 101515flin1984183-4409

Saad Lydia 2015 US liberals at record 24 but still trail conservatives Gallup January9 2015 Online httpwwwgallupcompoll180452liberals-record-trail-conservativesaspx last accessed July 2 2016


Sankoff David 1988 Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation Linguistics The Cam-bridge survey Vol 4 Language The socio-cultural context ed by Frederick J New -meyer 140ndash61 Cambridge Cambridge University Press

Sharvy Richard 1980 A more general theory of definite descriptions Philosophical Re-view 89607ndash24 DOI 1023072184738

Silverstein Michael 2003 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life Lan-guage amp Communication 23193ndash229 DOI 101016S0271-5309(03)00013-2

Sperber Dan and Deirdre Wilson 2004 Relevance theory In Horn amp Ward 607ndash32Strawson P F 1950 On referring Mind 59320ndash44 Online httpswwwjstororgstable

2251176 Tagliamonte Sali A and Derek Denis 2014 Expanding the transmissiondiffusion di-

chotomy Evidence from Canada Language 9090ndash136 DOI 101353lan20140016 Traugott Elizabeth Closs 2011 Pragmatics and language change The Cambridge

handbook of pragmatics ed by Keith Allan and Kasia M Jaszczolt 549ndash66 Cam-bridge Cambridge University Press DOI 101017CBO9781139022453030

Walker James A 2010 Variation in linguistic systems New York RoutledgeWolter Lynsey Kay 2006 Thatrsquos that The semantics and pragmatics of demonstrative

noun phrases Santa Cruz University of California Santa Cruz dissertation Woodward Richard B 2009 lsquoThe Americansrsquo revisited The Wall Street Journal No-

vember 18 2009 Online httpswwwwsjcomarticlesSB10001424052748704322004574477761913139506 last accessed April 14 2014

Department of English Language and Literature [Received 8 July 2016Eastern Michigan University revision invited 2 November 2016612 Pray-Harrold revision received 4 June 2017Ypsilanti MI 48197 revision invited 17 August 2017[eacton1emichedu] revision received 24 February 2018

accepted pending revisions 10 May 2018revision received 15 June 2018accepted 16 July 2018]


of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith of which the speaker is not amembermdashand to an extent that using a bare plural (BP) does not

Although using a the-plural very often does suggest that the speaker is not a memberof the relevant group is deemphasizing their membership in the group or is emphasiz-ing their nonmembership1mdashwhat I call the distancing effect of the-pluralsmdashthemeaning is not an entailment In 2 for instance it is clear that the Tea Party Patriotsand the possessors implicit in our pertain to the same group of individuals


(from the website of the lsquoTea Party Patriotsrsquo)2

Being nonentailed the meaning of interest does not fit squarely within the purview ofsemantics This suggests a need to turn to the subdisciplines that address nonentailedmeaning namely pragmatics and increasingly sociolinguisticsmdashparticularly sociolin-guistics in the third wave of variation studies (Eckert 2012) Indeed doing justice tothe present phenomenonmdashand a broad class of related phenomena besidesmdashmeansdrawing from connecting and extending both traditions

Concerning sociolinguistics the meaning of interest is social in nature in that it con-cerns the speakerrsquos relation to other individuals Moreover as I show in sect3 the phe-nomenon is amenable to variationist research Accordingly sociolinguistics has muchto offer here However the present case departs from the vast majority of variationistsociolinguistic research for which the relevant variants do not bear propositional mean-ing themselves or for which it is assumed lsquothat distinctions in referential value among[variants] are neutralized in discoursersquo (Tagliamonte amp Denis 201497 citing Sankoff1988153 see also Romaine 1984 Cheshire 2005) Instead the meaning of interest cru-cially depends upon differences between the encoded semantic meaning of the-pluralsand that of related alternative forms

Accordingly pragmatics too has much to offer in the present case Pragmatic researchhas greatly illuminated the dynamics by which utterances are enriched with nonentailedmeanings (eg Grice 1975 Horn 1984 Sperber amp Wilson 2004) At the same time thepresent phenomenon (and many others like it) calls for extending the insights of previ-ous research and complementing them with sociolinguistic theory and methodology

The remainder of this article is organized as follows I first provide a more thoroughoverview of the meanings of interest (sect2) and then present two corpus-based varia-tionist studies that show that the effect is clearly reflected in usage patterns and is sen-sitive to contextual factors (sect3) In sect4 I provide an overview of the insights that thetraditions of pragmatics and sociolinguistics offer for explaining the distancing andmonolithizing effects of the and connect and extend these insights in sect5 and sect6 in orderto explain these effects As I show a full account calls for an analysis that is at once semantic pragmatic and sociolinguistic Section 7 takes stock of the findings and theanalytical approach of the present article looking toward future sociolinguistic prag-matic and semantic research

2 More examples of the meaning As discussed with respect to example 1 andthe epigraph from Ted Cruz the use of the in talking about individuals often engendersa distancing effect A 1958 book of photographs of life in the US titled The Americansprovides another sharp illustration Authored by Swiss-born photographer Robert


1 I thank a referee for the suggestion to foreground the set-membership basis of the distancing effect2 lsquoTea Party Patriotsrsquo httpswwwteapartypatriotsorg last accessed July 10 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PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH …PRAGMATICS AND THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH DEFINITE ARTICLE ERIC K. ACTON Eastern Michigan University ... In discourse surrounding