KLEENEX RUBBER PANTIES

[Laurence Horn]

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