Heteronormativity and Indexical Reference
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In the first sentence of her dissent from the California Supreme Court's ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, Judge Carol Corrigan, appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005, explained that even though the marriages should not be legally sanctioned, "In my view, Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages." Leaving aside the wondrous temerity of allow, think for a moment about what a reader will do with that our. Did Corrigan really intend to convey that Californians, or at least her sort of Californians, don't include gays or lesbians themselves among their number (though they may have some living next door)? Not really, I suspect, but the pronoun betrayed the thought even so.
When a sentence contains a bare plural NP like Californians or linguists that's followed by a coreferential first-person-plural pronoun, the preceding NP has to be interpreted as equivalent to "We NP." In fact to my own mind, such sentences are, if not out-and-out ungrammatical, at least stylistically ill-advised. When I discover myself writing something like
Linguists feel we don't get sufficient respect from our colleagues.
I rewrite it as
We linguists feel we don't get sufficient respect from our colleagues.
The principle here is just a specific instance of the generalization that when you can refer to something indexically, you have to refer to it indexically — if I say, "I have a doctors's appointment on June 10," you assume that I don't believe it is June 10, or I would have been obliged to use today. And when you're talking to John, you refer to him as you and not John, unless you want to make some point by flouting the general rule. So when you hear the bare plural linguists, you're justified in assuming that the speaker doesn't consider him-or-herself as a member of that kind (in which case the reference would have been achievable by a mixed indexical expression we linguists). And then when you're brought up short by the first-person-plural pronouns, and have to go back and revise your interpretation of the antecedent.
It follows that Corrigan's assertion was really equivalent to:
We Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages
But in that case you can only conclude that the reference of (We) Californians is envisioned as a group that includes no gays or lesbians, both because you assume that it's only straight people who would be doing the "allowing" here, and because our neighbors sets up gays and lesbians as a disjoint set from the reference of the subject NP. (When you hear a sentence begin "We have to allow our Catholic neighbors to. . ." you're going to assume the speaker isn't a Catholic.) It's odd that neither the judge nor presumably any of her clerks noticed anything embarrasingly revealing about the sentence, which must have gotten a lot of looking over before the opinion was published. But then that's why they call it normativity.
Alyson said,
May 17, 2008 @ 5:50 am
"In my view, Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages."
My initial reading of that was that California has gay and lesbian neighbouring states!
Breffni said,
May 17, 2008 @ 8:03 am
Using an NP like "linguists" as an antecedent for 1st or 2nd person pronouns seems clearly ungrammatical to me if reflexives are any test:
1. *Linguists are fooling ourselves
2. *Linguists are always fighting among yourselves
But the principle that "when you can refer to something indexically, you have to refer to it indexically", if it holds in exactly that form, must be language-specific, because these are grammatical Spanish translations of 1 and 2:
Los lingüistas nos estamos engañando. (nos and estamos are 1st-plural)
Los lingüistas os estáis siempre peleando. (os and estais are 2nd-plural)
So the subject NP doesn't have to be explicitly 1st or 2nd person to function as an antecedent to a 1st or 2nd person pronoun. Maybe the fact that the verb indicates person unambiguously has something to do with it, but the same applies to French, and I'm pretty sure you can't say "Les français sommes…".
Amerloc said,
May 17, 2008 @ 9:09 am
And just who are the gay neighbors of "we Californians"? Is she suggesting that Nevadans and Arizonans and Oregonians and Mexicans fit that description? Or is she just one of those people who believes "everyone knows what I mean, so there's no need for linguistic precision."?
rootlesscosmo said,
May 17, 2008 @ 9:59 am
During the Civil Rights movement it was commonplace to hear "Southerners don't approve of social equality between the races," with the assumption that "Southerners" = "white Southerners." It's a disappointment about Justice Corrigan; she was regarded as a good, fair judge in Alameda County Superior Court, but on this case and the recent opinion narrowing the scope of Pruneyard (protected speech in publicly accessible spaces like malls) she's been dead wrong.
AdrianR said,
May 17, 2008 @ 12:00 pm
Exactly, rootlesscosmo. Look at the facts in the case: until this ruling, there were laws on the books disallowing gay couples from marrying. Now, it is a fairly safe assumption that these laws were backed more by heterosexuals than by homosexuals. Given this, it has been the heterosexuals who have so far disallowing the marriage of homosexuals, and so to say "Californians" meaning "Straight Californians" is not being heteronormative, it's being consistent with reality.
mike said,
May 17, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
It's not only straight Californians with gay neighbors; gay (or bisexual or whatever) Californians could have gay neighbors too.
Ryan Denzer-King said,
May 17, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
About indexical reference: I know a lot of people who will say "Let's do something on Friday" instead of "Let's do something tomorrow" when it is Thursday. Obviously this is at least part of the time an error or misunderstanding; the person doesn't realize that the next day is Friday. However, there have been many cases where the person does realize that the next day is Friday, and yet refuse to refer to it as tomorrow. This bugs me.
marie-lucie said,
May 17, 2008 @ 2:41 pm
@ Breffni:
Los lingüistas nos estamos engañando. (nos and estamos are 1st-plural)
Los lingüistas os estáis siempre peleando. (os and estais are 2nd-plural)
So the subject NP doesn't have to be explicitly 1st or 2nd person to function as an antecedent to a 1st or 2nd person pronoun. Maybe the fact that the verb indicates person unambiguously has something to do with it, but the same applies to French, and I'm pretty sure you can't say "Les français sommes…".
The difference between Spanish and French is that in Spanish estamos oand estais (or any verb forms) do not need a subject pronoun, but in French you cannot just say Sommes … as all verbs need an overt subject (and many verb forms are homophonous in several persons, even though they might be spelled differently). In this case you need a pronoun not only as the subject of a verb, immediately preceding it, but also before the noun-phrase, announcing its personal reference, thus for instance:
Nous, les linguistes, nous nous trompons … (or more colloquially, Nous, les linguistes, on se trompe … / … on se fait des illusions …).
Vous, les linguistes, vous vous disputez tout le temps. /… vous passez votre temps à vous disputer.
The extra pronoun in initial position before the noun-phrase is not needed if the verb is in the third person, agreeing with the noun, but a subject pronoun in this position is typical of colloquial style:
(written style) Les linguistes se trompent … / … se font des illusions … /… passent leur temps à se disputer.
(colloquial) Les linguistes, ils se trompent … / … ils se font … /… ils passent leur temps à se disputer.
marie-lucie said,
May 17, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
p.s. correction:
The extra pronoun in initial position before the noun-phrase is not needed if the verb is in the third person, agreeing with the noun, but a subject pronoun in this position is typical of colloquial style: I meant just before the verb, rather than before the noun-phrase:
(colloquial) Les linguistes, ils se trompent … / … ils se font … /… ils passent leur temps à se disputer.
marie-lucie said,
May 17, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
p.p.s. The only place were you could begin a French sentence with a characterized verb form like Sommes or Suis or Avons would be if for instance you were writing a journal entry (or, in the past, a telegram), omitting obvious words for brevity, but this would not happen in oral speech. Even in this case, it would seem very weird if not impossible to preface the verb with a noun-phrase intended to have the same reference as the pronoun. If the above verbs were auxiliaries, they would probably be omitted as well, for instance: Arrivés à Paris à 15h30 rather than Sommes arrivés …, although the latter would not be wrong in this particular context.
Martyn Cornell said,
May 17, 2008 @ 7:26 pm
While I agree entirely with the inferences you have drawn from the judge's words, I think it's possible to interpret what she said as "[You] Californians should allow our [meaning all of us, Californians and non-Californians] gay and lesbian neighbors …" . I don't think that's what she DID mean, I'm just saying it's possible to see itthat way …
Mark Young said,
May 17, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
I agree that the sentence implied that gays and lesbians are not Californians, but I don't think the problem was with the word "our" at all. Also, I have no grammatical objection to the sentence as written, and a google search brings up more examples consistent with the judge's grammar than with Nunberg's.
To me, the offending implication of disjointness comes entirely from the use of the word "neighbours". Suppose that the judge had written:
In that case, I'd say there was no implication that Californians are not gay.
As for changing "Californians" to "We Californinans" — I googled "Americans must * our" and the first nine examples appeared without a "we" in front of "Americans" (tho one of those is clearly a headline or subtitle). The second page shows eight of nine sentences not using the prononun before the noun (one sentence is "We, as Americans, must…".) The search above gets about six times as many hits as "We Americans must * our" — 15,400 vs. 2,470.
"Californians must * our" gets only 11 distinct hits on Google, of which only four or five are relevant, and only one of those uses the "We Californians" version. My results were:
we, as Californians, must convince our representatives
(pdf version of above)
We, as Californians, must examine our commitment
Californians must focus on our priorities
Simply put, Californians must depend upon our educa-. tional systemat
we as Californians must decide what our priorities
Californians must vote to protect our own interests
current generation and future Californians, we must ramp up our infrastructure investment
As Californians we must demand that our governor
I applauld how the governor is talking about some of the everyday problems facing Californians who must drive our congested roads
let me remind you about how we Californians still must pay additional $$ in our premiums
Putting Californians first must be our top priority
I count numbers 4, 5, 7 and possibly 10 as examples corrsponding to the judge's way of speaking, and only number 11 as corresponding to the blogger's.
Geoff Nunberg said,
May 17, 2008 @ 11:26 pm
Mark,
I know these occur — I just feel they're infelicitous. In any event, the crucial point is that the subject NP has a first-person kind reading: that is, the sentence makes a generic statement about the kind Californians (whose truth-conditions, I should add, are considerably stronger than those suggested by Adrian R: the mere fact that a majority of Californians are straight wouldn't license the assertion of "Californians are straight," no more than one could say "Californians are white" or "Californians are Christian" or "Californians live in the southern half of the state").
One other point: when you do a Google search like this, it's a good idea to look at the whole document and not just the snippet on the results page. For example, the example you give as 7:
current generation and future Californians, we must ramp up our infrastructure investment
Actually reads in full:
For the benefit of both the current generation and future Californians, we must ramp up our infrastructure investment at a rapid pace.
which is not relevant to the point at hand. Similarly, the example:
Putting Californians first must be our top priority.
Actually reads in full:
"Putting Californians first must be our top priority. It’s time for the legislature to get serious about restoring the California dream,” said Assemblyman Benoit.
Not that this alters the underlying point, but it's always good to have clean data to argue from.
Mark Young said,
May 18, 2008 @ 12:55 am
Geoff,
I fear that the numbers of my examples got left off — ol tags are not accepted by the posting s/w.
The two examples you mention were not numbers 7 and 11, but numbers 8 and 12 — neither of which I counted as relevant. (The matter was complicated by the fact that Google gave me 12 hits, but the first two were the same paper in different formats. Thus while I said 11 distinct hits, my numbers ran to 12 — I noticed the discrepancy before I posted, but I thot the numbers would appear and so prevent confusion. My apologies.)
The examples I counted as relevant were
(4) Californians must focus on our priorities
(5) Simply put, Californians must depend upon our educa-. tional systemat
(7) Californians must vote to protect our own interests
(10) I applauld how the governor is talking about some of the everyday problems facing Californians who must drive our congested roads
(11) let me remind you about how we Californians still must pay additional $$ in our premiums
of which I took the first three or four to be speaking the way you objected to, and the last to be in conformity with your preference.
And while you may find that way of speaking "infelicitous", I think the numbers I provided mean that this comment from your original post:
if not actually wrong, is at least in need of some justification.
And I do think, by the way, that it is wrong. I would not hesitate to speak of what Canadians or Nova Scotians say, think or do without prefixing a "we", and I would not — do not, given the samples I found when I googled — find it at all odd for an American to speak similarly of Americans. I took the judge's comment to indicate that she was a Californian, and I was not "brought up short" when the "our" appeared.
Similarly, the following text:
would not lead me to believe that the writer did not consider himself a linguist.
P Terry Hunt said,
May 18, 2008 @ 2:08 pm
I think Ryan Denzer-King may be missing an intended subtlety when he says . . . "I know a lot of people who will say "Let's do something on Friday" instead of "Let's do something tomorrow" when it is Thursday . . . where the person does realize that the next day is Friday, and yet refuse[s] to refer to it as tomorrow. This bugs me."
If one refers to doing something 'tomorrow', the implied significant point is only that it is the day after today (and perhaps short notice). However, for the majority of people in Western culture, Friday is the last day of the working week and therefore suitable for recreational activities (often involving staying up very late and/or drinking heavily) inadvisable if the 'tomorrow' in question is itself followed by a working day.
Saying on a Thursday "Let's do something on Friday" instead of " . . . tomorrow" may therefore suggest that the 'something' should be a specifically Friday-ish activity, rather than one equally appropriate for, say, Tuesday.
Arnold Zwicky said,
May 19, 2008 @ 9:27 am
The linguists sentence ("Linguists feel that we …") brings me up short out of context, but in the right context, I think it's fine. In particular, if linguists have been established as a discourse topic and it's been established that the person producing the sentence is a linguist, then i think it flies just fine. As in these examples from my collection of cases of anaphoric agreement:
1. … between reporters and the people we cover. (reporter on NPR’s Morning Edition, 5/11/05)
2. These are dimensions along which gays decide just how gay we want to be. (Kenji Yoshino, Covering (Random House, 2006), p. 79)
The first comes from a piece in which a reporter was talking about reporting. The second comes from a book about gay people and how they present themselves in public, written by an out gay man.
Using a third-person pronoun produces a distancing effect, while the first-person pronoun conveys identification with the group in question. The alternative scheme for conveying identification is the appositive construction "we/us" + Npl (instead of bare Npl) for the antecedent. This is what Geoff Nunberg recommends, but I find the appositive construction with "we" on the stiff side stylistically (and its accusative counterpart, with "us", on the folksy side) and generally prefer to avoid it. (As a side issue, there's the phenomenon of "we" + Npl for objects — #1 with "between we reporters and …" — which has been around for a long time and is more common than you might think. There's a good brief discussion in MWDEU under "we".)
Andy Hollandbeck said,
May 19, 2008 @ 1:14 pm
Neighbors can certainly be interpreted in a number of ways, and perhaps she was thinking on a more national or international scale? Part of marriage law involves recognizing marriages from other jurisdictions. Considering she was against the legalization of same-sex marriages, perhaps she does agree that California (or, at least, Californians) should recognize gay marriages from other places, say, the US's neighbor, Canada?
Joshua said,
May 19, 2008 @ 8:10 pm
In fact, one of the six cases under review in that decision had to do with California recognizing gay marriages from other jurisdictions but refusing to term its own civil unions "marriages," so Andy Hollandbeck's comment is pertinent. We'd need more context to know which way she meant it.
On a related note, I should think the more interesting twist on this case from Language Log's point of view would be the main issue the Court ruled on – namely that it's impermissible to extend rights to two different groups that are substantively the same under different names. It's a very linguisticy/semantic nitpicking bit of legal reasoning.
Anonymous Cowherd said,
May 27, 2008 @ 8:45 pm
I agree with "mike" above: Not only straight Californians have gay neighbors; gay Californians can have gay neighbors too.
I also agree that the lack of "We" in "We Californians" is ungrammatical (although I think "We Californians" is kind of colloquial to start with).
It's also possible that Corrigan was, indeed, referring to how gay Oregon is.
Sahra said,
October 31, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
Californians refers to the politically powerful majority. Separating the gay & lesbian subgroup out is an artifact of the discussion. In the same way that school children would be lexically identified in sentences that concern them.