The ontological categories of sounds, tactile sensations, manners, and distances have not to my knowledge received
significant attention in the literature. Let us look for a moment at the logic of sounds. Noticethat the twosentences in
(13) can be used to describe the same situation.
(13) a.There's that noise again!
b. There's another one of those noises!(13a) describes the situation as the recurrence of the same individual—hearing the noise again is like seeing the sun
againthenextday. Bycontrast,(13b)describesthesituationas hearing anothersound ofthesametype(wegettotypes
shortly).A similar ambivalenceattachestoother temporallydependentontologicaltypes, for exampleThere's that pain in
my leg againvs.There's another of those pains in my leg!; It's sunrise/Tuesday againvs.It's another sunrise/Tuesday.
Words appear to be classified as a species of sounds (even when written):‘Star’appears twice in that sentencevs. (slightly
less natural)There are two 'star's in that sentence. Mahler's Second(example (5a)) leans more strongly in the direction of the
(13a) conceptualization:They played Mahler's Second six times on touris much more natural thanThey played six Mahler's
Seconds on tour(musicians do, however, say this sort of thing).^162
Are all the sorts of entities in (11)–(12)“in the world”? They are certainlynot like refrigerators—you can't touch them
or move them. In fact, it is odd to say they allexistin the way that refrigerators exist (“the length of thefish exists”??).
Yet (11)–(12) show that we can pick the mout of the perceptualfield and use the mas the referents of deictic
expressions. So we must accord them some dignified status in the conceptualized world—the“model”that serves as
the basis for linguistic reference.
Now notice what has just happened. Up until this section we have been concerned with reference to objects, and we
have used perceptual theory to ground the theory of reference. Now all of a sudden we have turned the argument on
its head: if this is the way reference relates to perception, perception must be providing a far richer range of entities
thanhad previouslybeensuspected.Itis nowa challenge for perceptual theory todescribehowtheperceptual systems
accomplish this. In other words, examples like (11)–(12) open the door for fruitful cooperation between linguistic
semantics and research in perception.
Glancing back at an issue raised in Chapters 5, 8, and 9, consider the degree
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(^162) Giventhattheuse ofsix Mahler's Secondsis confinedtoa smallcommunity, I suspectitis shorthandforsix performances of Mahler's Second, i.e.itis a conventionalizedcoercion,
parallel to the more widespreadthree coffees forthree cups/portions of coffee. See section 12.2.