Pragmemes and modes of presentation (on professors, teachers, cardinals and popes)

2. Pragmemes and modes of presentation

When I visited an old lady who lived two floors up in our block of flats, Signora Giancotti, I was still a child and I used to answer her customary question “Chi è?” (Who’s there?) with the ritual answer “Sono io” (It’s me). There is, of course, some redundancy in such answers, but I am not about to speak about the relevance (or otherwise the failure of the application) of Grice’s maxim of manner or of quantity to this example, but about modes of presentation, as this is the topic of the paper.

A linguistically-determined mode of presentation (of an individual) is (normally) a linguistic expression that induces us to think of a certain referent (a person, an object, or a place) in a certain way by promoting/publishing certain characteristics of the referent (whether these characteristics are objective or subjective does not matter for the aim of this discussion). A linguistically-determined mode of presentation is always a perspectived description of a referent (the information being included may refer to the speaker’s attitude (as when one calls a German a ‘Bosch’ (Williamson, T., mn), to the speaker’s ideological attitude or to the speaker’s spatial and temporal position (‘the former President of the United States’, ‘that man there’, etc.). As Burge (1990) says:

Thoughts are the individual’s perspective on the world. And meanings or senses are, very roughly speaking, a speaker’s way of expressing such a perspective in language. They are what an individual understands and thinks in the use of his words (Burge 1990, 118).

It may be important to distinguish, from the outset, between a speaker’s mode of presentation (in uttering a sentence, the speaker of that sentence refers to an individual (distinct from herself) by means of mode of presentation MoPx) and the mode of presentation (of a referent) attributed to someone whose speech or beliefs are reported/described (by someone distinct from himself/herself). We use ‘SRS’ to designate the subject of the reported speech and we assimilate the subject of a described belief (that is not the main speaker’s belief) to a ‘SRS’.
Alternatively, pending a reluctance to assimilate the two concepts, we can distinguish a ‘SRB’, a subject of a reported belief, which is the person to whom the belief is attributed. So, we have so far two distinct modes of presentation: MoPxS (mode of presentation of a referent x as is presented to the speaker’s consciousness) and MoPx(SRS/SRB), the mode of presentation of a referent x as is presented to the subject of reported speech or to the subject of a reported belief.

Modes of presentation need not be linguistic entities. I believe Donnellan (1990) has provided convincing evidence that this proposition is true. Even dogs, he argues, which do not speak, have modes of presentation of individuals (e.g. their owners) – a dog will not bark at what looks like its ordinary owner, but it may bark at its owner, if he presents himself in different guise to it. Donnellan also argues that, even if we did not have the words ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Hesperus’ to distinguish the two different guises of the same planet, we could still have distinct concepts or modes of presentation – distinct ways of thinking of the same object. Despite the intuitive appeal of Donnellan’s considerations, I confine this paper to a linguistic treatment of modes of presentation.

I believe that the use of certain and not of other (alternative) linguistic modes of presentation is often determined by social conventions that have a bearing on linguistic behaviour. Certain rules of interaction, determined by the fact that the interaction is a certain type of social event (or is embedded in a certain social event), are operative in selecting one from a set of alternative modes of presentation.

In what situations could I use “Sono io” (It’s me) as an answer to a question such as “Chi è?” (“Who’s there?). Presumably (as an adult) I am allowed to use this utterance with my families. It would be strange if I answered “Sono io” to the ritual identification question as asked by some friend of mine (albeit, in this circumstance, it would be customary to answer by a name, leaving out the surname). I believe that the constraint is not a familiarity relationship between the two conversationalists, but a relationship of kinship.

Now, what should we make of this example drawn from my childhood experiences? Was I wrong in using that utterance (is it reasonable to suppose that I still had an imperfect knowledge of the rules)? Is the rule to be stretched a bit, so as to accommodate a familiarity relationship in the case of children/adults or children/children interactions? Or was I making a tacit claim to a kinship relation between myself and Signora Giancotti? (Well, there is no denying that as a child I considered her a surrogate mother for some time).
I believe it is not irrelevant, at this point, to expatiate on Italian culture and language – to show that matters of language and culture are inseparable. Children, especially at those old times, were encouraged to see close neighbours as sort of relatives. For example, I can never forget that we used to call our neighbour who lived in the block of flats opposite our own “Zia Maria” (aunt Mary). This was not an idiosyncratic use, but it was the norm there (in the particular area where we used to live (Calabria)), and, as expected, we never heard Zia Maria oppose our use or find it strange. Of course, given the rule, her children were not surprised that we called her “Zia Maria”, even if she was not our aunt, and they were not our cousins. In fact, while it was licit to see ‘Signora Maria’ as ‘Zia Maria’, we would have never dreamed of calling her children ‘cousins’ – we never thought of them that way, while we never doubted that Zia Maria was our ‘aunt’ (given the value of ‘zia’ in that dialect: ‘surrogate aunt’/’real aunt’). So, strange though it was, children did not have special names for one another (but just used proper names).
I think that this point about language and culture is not unimportant, because it invariably shows that languages are the correlates of social norms embedded in culture. In the light of these considerations, we can contextualize my childhood use of “Sono io” and suggest that I was using that mode of presentation because I considered Signora Giancotti a ‘sort of relative’.

Now, I think, we can make a leap forward towards explaining why the apparently uninformative reply is not, in fact, uninformative (in the linguistic perspective taken here). The mode of presentation used in the predicate “Sono io” does not just establish identity between the speaker and himself (which would be redundant), but presents the speaker as a person that the hearer should identify by just hearing his/her voice. So, the utterance amounts to saying “I am a person you must identify by just hearing my voice”.

Who are the people we can/must identify by just hearing their voices, who would certainly be offended if we did not identify them in this way? These are certainly families or people with whom we are so familiar with to consider them (our) families (or part of an enlarged family).

There are two sides of use. For every linguistic expression, we have to consider the cases where a certain use is licit, and those where a certain use is not (as Mey (2001, 43) says, “the context determines both what one can say and what one cannot say”). We have confined ourselves to showing when it is licit to say “Sono io”; now we have to say when it is not licit to say “Sono io”. Suppose I distribute brochures, and I knock on a door and someone inside answers “Chi è?” (“Who’s there?”). Then, surely I would not dream of replying by uttering “Sono io”, as the person would have no elements allowing her to recognize me, and thus the reply, this time, would misleadingly claim/suggest that I am a person that can/should be recognised by the voice, when, in fact, I am not. I am barred from such uses, because by these uses I would be taken to claim a kind of intimacy which, in fact, does not exist and also because the person behind the door might have reasons to believe that I am trying to persuade her to open the door in a fraudulent way. Well, we can start to anticipate that there is a link of some kind between modes of presentation and actions, and that the choice of some modes of presentation may be aimed at favouring a certain action or obtaining certain results (to go back to the previous example, when I say “Sono io”, I am not just saying who I am, but I am steering the hearer’s action towards the satisfaction of my desires (the opening of the door, without further questioning about the reason why the door should opened).

Now, suppose that I ring the doorbell, my mother asks “Chi è” and I reply “Sono io”, a declarative sentence. A neighbour is, in fact, overhearing our conversation (behind his door). Given that we normally believe the things we say and that propositions of the type P, when they are asserted, are understood as having a structure such as:

P,

then would it be unreasonable for my neighbour to say: “Alessandro believes that he is himself”?

I believe that in cases of pragmemes, such as the one we are analysing, it would be wrong and utterly misleading to report a belief that is expressed by an utterance by embedding the literal utterance in a belief operator. The first procedure we have to abide by, when we try to report the beliefs expressed through an utterance, is to elucidate what pragmeme was uttered, and then relate a belief state to that pragmeme. So, I believe that a natural and reasonable step would be to report what goes on by saying that Alessandro believes that he is recognizable by the hearer by his voice. In other words, Alessandro never dreamed of meaning that he was himself (surely an uninformative statement, albeit a correct belief about himself), and, most crucially, never expressed the belief that he was himself (a rather odd belief indeed to express!). Neither is it correct to say that he expressed the belief that he was recognizable by the hearer by his voice through his belief that he was himself (the pragmeme is not like an indirect speech act in which the literal meaning is augmented in context; the pragmeme is obtained through a transformation). In other words, I propose that we should abandon the strategies we know so well in connection with indirect speech acts and with cases of explicatures, in which a plausible intention is imputed by a hearer by enriching a partial logical form. The pragmatic process we have to consider now is that of a drastic transformation due to the powerful effect of the context of utterance and of a social rule saying:

Utterance X counts as Y uttered in U’s mouth in circumstances such-and-such (due to a social rule that is embedded in the situation in which the utterance occurs).

So, I think we are now able to perceive the neat distinction between a pragmeme and a (literal) indirect speech act. In a (literal) indirect speech act, the literal meaning is a basis for the intended meaning and the intended meaning is related to the literal meaning. In a pragmeme, the literal meaning is superseded by the contextual elements that are associated with it by the rules determined by the fact that the utterance is part of a certain social event. What kind of social event is involved in the interpretation of the exchange “Chi è?”/ “Sono io”? Presumably the event in question is:

X is visiting Y.

This event has got a trajectory (to repeat words by Schegloff) and the first slot in the trajectory is filled by an identification event (or procedure). The rule that is responsible for the interpretation of “Sono io” must at least make reference to the social event we are in (the visit), in addition to making reference to the slot in the trajectory, specifying that the action occurs in the identification slot.

I have argued elsewhere that indirect speech reports must make reference to what I called ‘a surrogate’ context. The speech report must, in some way, encapsulate this surrogate context. In my paper ‘Pragmemes’ I have reflected on the use on the part of teachers (nowadays; in old days the expression to be examined just had its literal meaning) of the utterance “Vieni” (“Come”) which, in the context of a class, does not preserve its literal meaning, but comes to acquire the meaning “I want to ask you some questions” through a transformation due to the rules in force in that situation of use.

Now, suppose that I am the teacher and Mary overhears my utterance “Vieni” as addressed to John, which, in a certain slot in the trajectory of the event ‘class activity’, comes to mean “I want to ask you some questions”. Then she is barred from reporting to someone else “L’insegnante ha detto a John di andare da lui” (“The teacher asked John/told John to go to him”), but will have to say “L’insegnante voleva fare delle domande a John” (The teacher wanted to ask John some questions). In other words, the indirect speech report must preserve the original context (together with its rules that transformed the utterance into a specific pragmeme). The indirect speech report has to preserve the ‘surrogate’ context.

So my considerations about someone who reports “Sono io” in indirect speech must follow pretty general considerations. Indirect speech reports must preserve a surrogate context.

Now, what is of some theoretical interest about all this is that the word “io” (me) in the utterance “Sono io” (It’s me) is doubly indexical. It both refers to the person who speaks and qualifies such a person as someone known to the hearer, whom s/he should recognize immediately through his/her voice. So, I believe that it is part of the meaning of the ‘pragmeme’ that the speaker uses a mode of presentation, amounting to “I, a person whom you know well and whom you should identify through the voice”. There is no doubt, at least in this case, that the mode of presentation is inherent in the way the utterance is used in the context of use.