the meaning of GENERIC in linguistics

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Larry Horn's comments (reproduced below) were for me thought-provoking , aND 
I need to think about them some more. (Thanks, Larry, for the summary of 
aspects of the Horn-Kleinedler LSA paper, which I think you were indeed kind enough 
to send me some time in the past.) However, I hope Larry will give me some 
clarification of just how he is using the term GENERIC in linguistics for words 
where trademarks are not involved, because he seems to be using the term 
GENERIC in a way unusual to either linguistics or the law. 

With respect to trademark law, the term "generic" relates to features of 
individual words--trademarks are as special kind of proper noun. This is the sense 
in which it is usually used in lexicography, to my knowlege. In linguistics, 
to my knowledge, "generic" is a syntactic property of nouns rather than an 
inherent feature of individual words. That is to say, "man" and "guy" are 
intrinsically neither generic nor nongeneric; rather, they are construed as "generic" 
or "nongeneric" in particular linguistic contexts. This is the definition 
that I find in all introdcutory linguistics textbooks and dictionaries of 
linguistics, which usually gok on to give such stock examples as the following:

GENERIC: Man is an animal that nurses its young.
GENERIC: A man should always open a door for a lady.
NONGENERIC: A man opened a door for a lady.
NONGENERIC: The man was an animal who tried to nurse his young.

So I totally agree with Larry that the noun MAN "isn't quite the same as 
'kleenex' " with respect to genericness; indeed, lexically, MAN is always 
potentially either generic or nongeneric, and so is GUY, except insofar as MAN or GUY 
may be a trademark, which is perfectly possible (though I don't know of any 
myself off the top of my head). Syntactically, MAN is either generic or 
nongeneric, depending on the syntax. That is to say, there is indeed a major 
difference between words such as GUY or MAN and words such as KLEENEX: brand names are 
intrinsically generic proper nouns, and people give them some kind of special 
status based on that fact.

"autohyponymous" is a term that I am not familiar with, so I have some 
trouble following Larry's argument below (how a word can be hyponymous to itself is 
not clear to me).   I agree, though, that speakers' use of KLEENEX to refer to 
tissues in general often times "reflects speakers' knowledge of their 
meaning" as (1) trademarks (proper nouns) and as (2) the thing that the trademark 
(proper noun) most frequently refers to (i.e, facial tissues)--indeed, I that 
hass been pretty much central to my argument all along! On the other hand, 
speakers' use of ZIPPER to refer to a type of fastener "reflects" only on the latter 
kind of knowledge.

Why Larry and Steve would call MAN a "quasi-generic"--and what the difference 
is for them between "quasi-generic" and "pseudo-generic"--I'd also like to 
know about.

In a message dated 3/3/05 11:54:12 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> At 9:18 AM -0500 3/3/05, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
> >
> >As for "ignoring usage," it is only by ignoring the FULL data of usage 
> (i.e.,
> >taking into account only what people SAY in informal speech, as opposed to
> >what they say in other registers, and, more importantly, what they KNOW 
> about
> >the words of the language) that one can justify calling KLEENEX "generic."
> 
> I take your point, but (without retrotting out the arguments I've
> already advanced in this thread) I think you're still underestimating
> the possibility that what speakers know is that "kleenex" and similar
> words are in fact autohyponymous, in which case their *use* as
> generics reflects speakers' *knowledge* of their meaning, as with
> "Yankee" and other instances of...can we call them "concentrics"?
> 
> >It occurs to me that the whole terminological problem could perhaps be 
> solved
> >by labeling words such as KLEENEX "psuedo-generics" or "quasi-generics," at
> >least for purposes of lexicography and other branches of linguistics. I'm 
> not
> >sure how the lawyers would take to that, but this is our profession, not
> >theirs.
> 
> In fact I've used these labels for a somewhat different case, that of
> *man*, in which (as others have argued before me) speakers don't in
> fact behave as though there is a true gender-neutral meaning, but at
> the same time there is a sense that isn't strictly male-referential.
> (In the paper Steve Kleinedler and I presented on this at the LSA a
> few years ago, we invoked Roschian prototypes to provide the
> appropriate model for what we called "QG [quasi-generic] _man_".)
> I'd argue that this isn't quite the same as "kleenex", which really
> does mean 'facial tissue'.  Our paper was a response to an
> influential paper by the philosopher Janice Moulton, who claimed that
> the notion of "parasitic reference", as defined by genericization of
> "kleenex" for 'tissue', "clorox" for 'bleach', etc., should be
> extended to the case of "man", and we pointed out various differences
> between the two cases leading us to reject this identification,
> including the obvious historical one ("kleenex" involved broadening,
> "man" involved narrowing).  At the same time we suggested that her
> analysis would be directly applicable to the history and current
> status of "guy(s)".  There too, as with "kleenex" or "clorox" or
> "xerox", we do (I'd argue) need to invoke autohyponymy, not just
> careless uses, especially for those speakers who can have an
> individual woman in mind in referring to "the other guy", "the next
> guy", "just one guy", etc., but arguably also for those (possibly now
> a majority) who can refer to mixed-sex or all female groups as
> "(those) guys".   I'd vote to reserve "quasi-generic" for those cases
> where no true generic sense is involved, as with (according to me)
> "man", as opposed to those where a generic and a specific sense exist
> side-by-side, as with (according to me) "kleenex" or "guy(s)".  YMMV,
> of course.
> 
> Larry
>