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

4. The school situation
I think we ought to consider another type of situation: the school. I have a student whom I have known since he was a child. I call him Marco, and he usually calls me ‘Sandro’. But now I am his teacher. Thus, at school, in front of the other pupils, he calls me ‘teacher’. When he meets me in the street he calls me ‘Sandro’. There is a very strict norm that enjoins him to say things such as “The teacher is very good” at school, and to replace ‘the teacher’ with ‘Sandro’ if he expresses the same thought at home with his mother, who is my friend too. The mode of presentation of the reference (I am the reference in this case) is determined by the situation we are in and by the rules that obtain in that situation. Who is talking to whom matters too. If Marco is talking with me in the absence of his classmates, then he will address me as ‘Sandro’, while if his classmates are present he will address me as ‘Teacher’, using a mode of presentation that is related to my function in the institution/situation we are in. If Marco is talking about me with his friend Mario, who is also a friend of mine (and I am not in the vicinity), he can very well use the mode of presentation ‘Sandro’, instead of ‘the teacher’.
Obviously a mode of presentation such as ‘The teacher’ is elliptical for ‘The English teacher’ and, considering that a school does not have a unique English teacher, but a class has, then ‘The English teacher’ takes ‘the class we are in’ as the proper domain of quantification. In other words, some pragmatic work of expansion is required for the use and understanding of the use of modes of presentations that are required by institutional settings.
That the use of modes of presentation is sensitive to whom is speaking to whom before whom is shown by examples such as (in the Italian language):

1. 
   Quella d’inglese deve ancora venire
   

(that of English must still arrive)
(The English teacher must still arrive).

The utterance (1) is acceptable if uttered by a student to another student, but not if uttered by a student to a teacher or by a student to another student, in the presence of a teacher (albeit not the teacher talked about). That pragmatic expansion is required in (1) is obvious, as the fake demonstrative ‘Quella’ (That) in that situation counts as meaning “The teacher x”. These expansions are licit only in this type of situation. We refer to teachers by these expressions (and teachers can refer to teachers by these expressions, when they talk to students, albeit not when they talk to other teachers), not to surgeons.

There are institutional factors at work to ensure that students do not talk about other teachers to a teacher saying “Quello d’italiano”.

I believe that it’s time to say that a (linguistic) mode of presentation is not just a way in which the reference X presents itself to a thinking subject (or to a speaker), but is also a socially-determined way of thinking and of speaking of a referent that is a function of the situation of utterance and of the relations among participants (to the event in question). A mode of presentation in the standard case is a subjective way of seeing a person (or a referent), one that involves elements of subjectivity, such as the perspectived observation on the part of the speaker (I could say ‘The man in pink trousers’, referring to a man whose trousers are rendered pink by the light conditions). The mode of presentation is the way a person represents to himself another person or an object. However, in institutional contexts a mode of presentation is normally a conventional way of seeing a person (or a way of talking of an individual prescribed by the rules inherent in the situation). We look at a person with the eyes of society, we see her in the role or function with which society invests her. A situational mode of presentation is the result of agreeing to a norm enjoining us to call a person in such-and-such a way in a certain situation.

Individuals can be referred with in a multiplicity of ways. So it is an innocent truism to say that:

Given an individual, there are potentially infinite modes of presentation by which one can refer to that individual.

Not all modes of presentation are capable of allowing the hearer to identify the individual referred to. Thus, even if only Mario wears a jacket with an almost invisible spot on its left pocket, a description of Mario through the jacket with an almost invisible spot will hardly suffice to identify the intended individual. Another example of how irritating it is to have an individual referred to through a mode of presentation which surely applies to the individual, but does not give the hearer sufficient clues to identify him, is to use proper names, such as ‘Mario’ (as opposed to surnames), in sentences such as (1):

1. 
   Mario has arrived.
   

As the hearer does not know the individual x ‘Mario’ refers to by that name (we make this supposition), if the speaker knows that an act of reference cannot be appropriately and successfully accomplished by its use, then he had better avoid using that mode of presentation, and he should instead use one that can identify the individual in question uniquely (and easily/efficiently) for the hearer. Put more bluntly, the mode of presentation will have to include properties the hearer recognizes, such that will lead him to identify the intended referent. Consider what Mey (2001) says on this issue:

Consider also the ways in which we refer to persons or things: using proper names, pronouns, articles, and so on. A person named ‘John’ is referred to as ‘John’ only in his own, own context; a person named ‘the policeman’ is an officer we know (or we are supposed to know). Saying ‘John is the policeman’ makes sense only in a context where there is a person John whom I know by name and who happens to be the policeman (…) (Mey 2001, 40).

It is implicit in Mey’s discussion that proper names such as ‘John’ (when they are not escorted by surnames) have got a domain of use, which must certainly be shared by the speaker and the hearer.

If there are two or more modes of presentation by which the speaker can hope to lead (cause) the hearer to identify the intended referent, the mode of presentation that will be chosen is the one which makes the act of referring more efficient. Suppose I can refer to the man in front of me by saying:

2. 
   The man with a green jacket is coming in;
   
3. 
   John is coming in.
   

Suppose, in addition to that, that the hearer can identify the intended referent (immediately) through the name “John”, which is a familiar mode of presentation for him; then it goes without saying that it will be more appropriate to use the name, instead of the definite description. The use of the definite description will, in fact, trigger the conversational implicature that the hearer does not know the individual in question by name and that by using that name reference is not successfully established. The considerations proposed so far rest on a pragmatic notion of ‘efficiency’. We are instead looking for institutional constraints on the use of modes of presentation.

5. Modes of presentation and frames
I believe that a common enough constraint is to mandate the use of modes of presentation that have a bearing on (are related to) the activities being performed. If there is a lecture in my department and I introduce Professor Sir Peter Strawson, then it is required that I present the reference to the hearers in such a way (or guise) that it will be relevant to the proceedings. The mention of the title ‘Professor’ is a good clue that will be conducive to expectations concerning what is to come next (anticipating whether it is an academic event, for instance). If I announced the speaker by the title “Mr Strawson”, not only by conversational implicature would I implicate that he does not have a doctorate or an academic title (Levinson 1983 on scalar implicature), but I would infringe the quite strict rule that the mode of presentation chosen should bear on the proceedings of the activity.

Suppose I have stopped to talk in the street with my barber. John meets me at this point, and I have to introduce him to my barber. Then it will not do to say “This is my barber” (to start with), but one will have to refer to that individual by name (“I introduce you to Mr Jones”). The problem is that a mode of presentation that describes the person’s job will be relevant to the activities in which he is engaged when he is in his shop.

Now suppose you are at a hospital. The doctor refers you to a nurse. Should he say “Follow that nurse please” or “Follow that lady please!”. Presumably the latter option will not do, while the former will immediately bring out the interaction between the individual referred to and a certain activity type in which she is involved (it would not be advisable to follow a lady, but it is harmless to follow a nurse while she is at work). In other words, by saying “Follow that nurse, please”, the doctor will frame his injunction within the activities done (accomplished) at the hospital, while the use of an alternative mode of presentation such as “that lady” will not make it immediately clear that the order (or injunction) is part of an activity being carried out at the hospital as part of the hospital routine activities. I believe that the interplay I have pointed out between modes of presentation and action best exemplifies May’s (2001) illuminating statement that:

Context is more than just reference. Context is action. Context is about understanding what things are for; it is also what gives our utterances their true pragmatic meaning and allows them to be counted as true pragmatic acts (Mey 2001, 41).

So, I hope I have made it clear that, faced with a number of alternative modes of presentation, the speaker has to choose the one which will most efficiently serve to help the hearer to identify the referent, but must also choose the one which makes it immediately manifest that the speaker’s sentence is framed in a routine institutional activity. Using modes of presentation that are tied to routine institutional activities serves to signal that a speaker is acting (through his utterance) within a particular frame. To make an ulterior example, changing the setting and choosing the school, if I (as a teacher) refer to Mary as “the maths teacher” (while I am obviously capable of identifying her as ‘Mary’), I am not only presupposing a certain type of audience (e.g. students, rather than colleagues), but I am also signalling that the speech act I am proffering is part of an activity done in a certain frame, and does not indeed break frame (as the use of ‘Mary’ would do). To deepen considerations about frame theory, the reader is referred to Tannen (1993) and authors contained therein.