Puzzlement about ‘logophor’

2009 July 8
by Tom

This is very much a post requesting help with factual information. I seem to be getting conflicting information about what the word ‘logophor’ means.

Sense 1: Kaplan claimed that there are no monsters in English, i.e. operators that shift parameters of contexts rather than indices. His system allows for them, but it seems to be an empirical prediction that they do not occur. Some linguists have claimed that some languages seem to behave in the way monsters would allow for. Derek Ball gave a talk at the recent Arché Summer School where he discussed some of the data. A candidate language often appealed to is Amharic. For example, it is discussed in Philippe Schlenker’s influential 2003 Linguistics and Philosophy paper ‘A Plea for Monsters’. The claim is that the Amharic first person pronoun can be used in speech reports in a way that it cannot be used in English. It would be as if we introduced an expression I(amh) which allowed:
(1) John said that I(amh) am a hero.
to have the natural reading:
(2) John said that he himself is a hero.
That is how I recall the discussion going, anyway. I think that Derek referred to this as a logophoric (use of a) pronoun. Schlenker certainly uses this terminology in his paper.

Sense 2: I’ve also come across a sense of ‘logophor’ that seems to be a contrast with ‘anaphor’. In his 1997 Analysis paper ‘How much substitutivity?’ Graeme Forbes quotes an example from Quine:
(3) Giorgione is so-called because of his size.
Here ’so’ is identified by Forbes as a logophor. It picks up on the linguistic properties of an antecedent. (Compare an anaphor picking up on its antecedent’s referential properties.)

It might be that there is a difference in that the Amharic type case is a pronoun. But these two cases seem to differ in more than that. Sense 1 doesn’t seem to me to be referring to linguistic properties at all, any more than a standard English ‘I’ is. Am I missing a connection, or are these just different uses?

2 Responses leave one →
  1. 2009 July 8

    I’m almost certain that the two uses are unrelated (although both seem legitimate coinages of a technical term).

    For the Amharic-type cases, the term “logophoric” was introduced by Claude Hagège:

    Hagège, Claude (1974) “Les pronoms logophoriques,” Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris 69(1). 287-310.

    In that use, it designates pronouns who refer to the originator of an utterance.

    Forbes’ use of the term is about an element referring to (part of) a preceding utterance. It’s possible that he was not aware of the prior coinage in the linguistic literature.

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