implicit/implied (was Re: PSAT Glitch)

[Arnold Zwicky]

i was talking to a linguistics grad student on thursday about my
search through usage manuals for discussions of possessive
antecedents, adding that i was baffled by the use of "implicit" or
"(merely) implied" in the proscriptions.  ah, he said, as a good
student of semantics: if you translate sentences into formulas of
first-order logic, then "Toni Morrison's" in "Toni Morrison's books"
would translate as a property of books, not as a referent in addition
to the books; working out whether this property actually holds of
the books involves positing the existence of a referent named Toni
Morrison, but that referent doesn't actually get represented in the
formula.  so it's merely implied.

of course, the student added, that's just *first-order* logic.  and it
seemed unlikely to me that the writers of usage manuals were thinking
about translations of sentences into logical formulas, in any brand
of logic.

and then, without my prompting, he realized that his remarks would
apply to occurrences of "Toni Morrison" in *any* modifier, not just
possessives - in particular to occurrences in all sorts of postnominal
modifiers ("the books by/of/from Toni Morrison", "the books written by
Toni Morrison", "the books that Toni Morrison wrote", etc.), all of
which would translate into first-order logic as mere properties.  but
no one inveighs against pronouns referring back to "Toni Morrison" in
such modifiers (as several people pointed out way back at the
beginning of the discussion here).

so much for semantic cleverness.

clearly, the *intent* of the people who allude to NPs being "implicit"
or "merely implied" is to pick out only NPs that are functioning *as*
modifiers, not merely appearing *in* modifiers, that is, only
prenominal possessives (and, for those who notice this, the first noun
in noun-noun compounds like "Toni Morrison books").  the manuals that
just say things like "don't use pronouns to refer to nouns functioning
as adjectives" express this intent quite clearly (given the
terminology available to them), and some manuals just say "don't use
pronouns to refer to possessive nouns", period.  my problem is with
the writers who go on to attempt to justify the proscription on the
basis of implicitness, or who state the proscription directly in terms
of implicitness.  what's the sense of "implicit" or "implied" at work
here?  and where does this technical terminology come from?  (notice
how odd it is that these words have the latin-derived prefix "in-"
'in' in them, when they're being used to pick out expressions that are
used as modifiers, *not* merely in modifiers.)  there must be some
history here.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford), and, yes, i'm pleased to have
  committed the following:  "in-" 'in' in

oh dear, now it's just occurred to worry about how the various manuals
would treat "Mary's" in
   We gave each child a present.  Mary's was a toy bazooka,
     and she was tremendously pleased with it.

if your version of the proscription is no reference back to
possessives, then this is just out.  but if your version of the
proscription is no reference back to nouns serving as adjectives, then
i have to ask you whether "Mary's" in the bazooka sentence is serving
as an adjective, and it seems to me that plausible arguments could be
given on either side (within the conceptual framework of the manual
writers).

my larger concern is what the users of the manuals can make of the
"rules" stated in them.  how can they apply them in their own writing
and editing?  i suspect that they just give up on formulations
entirely in terms of implicitness or functioning-as-adjectives and
try to analogize from the (few) examples given to new cases.