Evaluative and orientative features

Jerrold J. Katz¹ and Manfred Bierwisch² have proposed semantic features which treat certain relations between objects and the human beings that deal with these objects. Katz has treated the semantic properties of words that relate to the ways in which objects and events are evaluated, and Bierwisch has proposed ways of associating with words information concerning the ways in which the objects they describe are related to spatial aspects of the language-user’s world.

For certain nouns the evaluative information is determinable in a fairly straight-forward way from their definitions. This is most clearly true in the case of agentive and instrumental nouns. Many definitions of nouns contain a component which expresses a typical function of the entity the noun can refer to. Thus the lexical entry for pilot will contain an expression something like (63):

(63)profession: A of [V O A]

where V is ‘navigate’, with the presupposition that O is an air vessel

and the lexical entry for knife will contain such an expression as (64):

(64) use: I of [V O I A]

where V is ‘cut’, with the presupposition that O is a physical object.

For such nouns I assume that the evaluative feature can be automatically specified from the function-identifying part of a definition. A noun which refers to a ‘typical’ (e.g. ‘ professional’) Agent in an activity is evaluated according to whether the Agent conducts this activity skilfully; a noun which names a typical Instrument in an activity is evaluated according to whether the thing permits the activity to be performed easily. In these ways we can make intelligible our ability to understand expressions like a good pilot, a good pianist, a good liar, a good knife, a good pencil, a good lock, etc.

For nouns whose definitions do not identify them as typical Agents or instruments, the evaluative feature apparently needs to be specified separately. Thus food is probably in part defined as (65):

(65) function: O of [V O A]

where V is ‘ eat ’.

Food is evaluated according to properties (namely nutrition and palatability) which are not immediately derivable from the definition of food, and this fact apparently needs to be stated separately for this item. To call something a good photograph is to evaluate it in terms of its clarity or its ability to elicit positive esthetic responses in the viewer, but neither of these notions can be directly derived from the definition of photograph. Here, too, the evaluative feature needs to be stated independently of the definition of the word.

The question a lexicographer must face is whether these matters have to do with what one knows, as a speaker of a language, about the words in that language, or what one knows, as a member of a culture, about the objects, beliefs and practices of that culture. Do we know about books that they are used in our culture to reveal information or elicit certain kinds of esthetic appreciation, or do we know about the word ‘ book ’ that it contains evaluative features that allow us to interpret the phrase a good book ? Do we understand the expression good water (as water that is safe for drinking) because its semantic description ha9 set aside that one use of water as the use in terms of which water is to be generally evaluated, or because we know that for most purposes (e.g. watering the grass, bathing) any kind of water will do, but for drinking purposes some water is acceptable and some is not? These are serious questions, but we can of course avoid facing them by making, with the typical lexicographer, the decision not to insist on a strict separation between a dictionary and an encyclopedia.³

The distinction between lexical information about words and non-lexical in¬ formation about things must come up in dealing with Bierwischian features too. Let us examine some of the ways in which users of English speak of the horizontal dimensions of pieces of furniture. If we consider a sofa, a table, and a chest of drawers, we note first of all that a sofa or a chest of drawers has one vertical face that can be appropriately called its front, but the table does not. For a non-verticaily-oriented oblong object that does not have a natural front, its shorter dimension is spoken of as its width, the longer dimension as its length. For the two items that do have a front, the dimension along that front is the width (even though it may be the longer of the two dimensions), the dimension perpendicular to the front is its depth.

Objects with fronts, furthermore, are typically conceived of as confronted from the outside, as is the case with the chest of drawers, or as viewed from the inside, as with the sofa. The terms left and right are used according to this inner or outer orientation. Thus the left drawer of a chest of drawers is what would be to our left as we faced it, the left arm of a sofa is what would be to our right as we face it.

This information is clearly related to facts about the objects themselves and the ways in which they are treated in our culture, and cannot be something that needs to be stated as lexically specific information about the nouns that name them. It seems to me, therefore, that the truly lexical information suggested by these examples is the information that must be assigned to the words left, right, wide, long and deep (and their derivatives), and that the facts just reviewed about the items of furniture are facts about how these objects are treated by members of our culture and are therefore proper to an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. It is difficult to imagine a new word being invented which refers to sofas but which fails to recognize one of its facts as its ‘ front ’; and it is likely that if a new item of furniture gets invented, the properties we have been discussing will not be arbitrarily assigned to the noun which provides the name for these objects, but rather the words wide, left, etc., will be used in accordance with the ways in which people orient themselves to these objects when they use them. That the orientation is a property of the position- and dimension-words is further demonstrated by the fact that the uses I have suggested are not by any means obligatory. If a 3 ft. by 6 ft. table is placed in such a way that one of its 6 ft. sides is inaccessible, with people sitting at and using the opposite side, the table can surely be described as 6 ft. wide and 3 ft. deep. On the other hand, a sofa that is 2 miles ‘ wide ’ would probably impress us more as a physical object than as a sofa and would most likely be described as being 2 miles long.

The phenomena I have been mentioning are to be stated as part of the presuppositional components of the lexical entries for the words left, wide, etc. Uses of the word wide presuppose that the object being referred to has at least one (typically) horizontal dimension; and that the dimension which this word is used to quantify or describe is either the main left-to-right extent of the object as human beings conceive their orientation to it, if that is fixed, or it is the shorter of two horizontal dimensions. The adjectives tall and short (in one sense) presuppose, as high and low do not, that the object spoken of is vertically oriented and is typically in contact with (or is a projection out of) the ground. Similarly the noun post, as opposed to pole, presupposes that the object in question is (or is at least intended to be) vertically oriented and in contact with the ground. Many of the features of spatial orientation treated by Bierwisch will take their place, in other words, in the presuppositional components of the semantic descriptions of words usable as predicates.

There are, however, some spatial-orientation features that appear to enter rather basically into the definitions of nouns. Of particular interest are nouns that identify conceptually n-dimensional entities where these are physically realized by m-dimensional objects, where m > n. Thus a line is conceptually one-demensional, and a stripe is conceptually two-dimensional. If a straight mark on a piece of paper is viewed as a line, the dimension perpendicular to its length is its thickness, but if it is viewed as a stripe, the second dimension is its width. If the stripe has a third-dimensional aspect (e.g. if it is drawn with heavy paint), it is that which one speak of as its thickness. These are matters that seem to be related to the ‘meaning’ of these nouns rather than to presuppositions about the objects they name.

¹ Jerrold J. Katz, ‘ Semantic theory and the meaning of “good” ’ (1964), Journal of Philosophy, LXI.

² Manfred Bierwisch, ‘Some semantic universals of German adjectivals’ (1967), Foundations of Language, m, 1-36.

³ As evidence of the linguistic validity of ‘evaluative features’ I would accept a pair of words which differ only in the evaluative features associated with them. If, for example, English food and feed could always refer to the same objects but served in the expressions goodfood and goodfeed to refer to food that was palatable and nutritious respectively, such a pair would provide a good argument for the existence of evaluative features as an aspect of linguistic competence.