Friday, December 2nd
Barry Schein (Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California)
Title: Frame, Count, Action. Semantics in Hollywood.
3-4:30 Communication Bldg 311

Abstract: Frequent flyers recounted in their frequent flights under (1)’s protocol keep (1) from implying (2):
(1) Four million passengers crowded National Airlines’ routes last year.
(2) # Four million frequent flyers crowded National Airlines’ routes last year.
(after Gupta 1980: 23, Moore 1994).
If the arithmetic property four million is determined by the numeric identity of what is referred to, four million passengers does not refer to the one million persons who flew frequently:
(3) (4,000,000(X) & 1,000,000(Y)) → X ≠ Y
Yet, the identity of passengers and frequent flyers denied in order to thwart the inference from (1) to
(2) is asserted—truly, it seems— in (4):
(4) The four million passengers who crowded National Airlines’ routes last year were the one million frequent flyers loyal to it.
Worse, the four million passengers of (1) who are fewer persons do not always exist as such, subject to a condition that Doetjes & Honcoop (1997) call sequencing of events:
(5) Four million passengers had four million opinions about the food on National Airlines.
(6) # Four million passengers have four million opinions about the food on National Airlines.
Sentence (1) can be followed by (5), recounting the passengers’ experience onboard and continuing to count as many the fewer. In the present tense, however, (6) cannot count more passengers than persons who fly, despite the fact that these persons still have four million opinions about flights they remember all too well. Do they who once numbered four million no longer exist?
Instead of ‘four million(X)’, let four million translate as something like “now counted to four million”, ‘count[E,X, 4000000]’, a description of events of measurement (the counter clicks, imagine). What is counted and what the indefinite description four million passengers denotes is naïvely what there is, persons, who are counted and under some protocols recounted. If the logical form of sentences turns nominal descriptions into adverbs (adverbialization), with counting now part of the description, sentences (5) and (6) become (7) and (8) respectively:
(7) Four million passengers while counted to four million had four million opinions about the food on National Airlines.
(8) #Four million passengers while counted to four million have four million opinions about the food on National Airlines.
Clicking the counter as passengers go by frames or locates opinion recorded contemporaneously as in (5); but, there is no counting to four million that frames current conditions, which, according to (8), is what defeats (6). The speaker is secure in her constant reference to naïve, familiar objects by a sleight of hand that manipulates her epistemic conditions, in this case, conditions of measurement.
In turn, the translation of four million may be further refined to ‘count[E,X, F, 4000000]’ to include a parameter F for the frame or frames of reference under which the protocol for measurement is conducted. There is then daylight among (9)-(11), no two of which are synonymous, in that (9) and (11) engage distributive quantification over frames of reference; and, the contrast between many elms
in (12)-(13) and some/the many elms in (14)-(15) reduces to that of plural and singular reference to frames of reference, without syntactic or semantic ambiguity in the morpheme many:
(9) many an elm
(10) many elms
(11) many a one or more elms
(12) * Many elms are a cluster in the middle of the forest.
(13) * Many elms that are a cluster in the middle of the forest are diseased.
(14) The many elms are a cluster in the middle of the forest.
Some (very) many elms are a cluster in the middle of the forest.
(15) The many elms that are a cluster in the middle of the forest are diseased.
Some (very) many elms that are a cluster in the middle of the forest are diseased.