Mistaking Ideational Denotation For Textual Reference

Martin & Rose (2007: 179-80):

Just as when she compares spiritual murder with physical murder she’s talking about the concepts in general, not the spiritual murder of her second love or the physical murders he may have committed; similarly a murder victim refers to all members of this class of things:

Spiritual murder is more inhumane than a messy, physical murder.
At least a murder victim rests.

Because it refers to general classes of things, reference of this kind is called generic reference. As with the examples just considered, it involves much less tracking than specific reference to individuals.

In arguments this kind of reference is the norm. Tutu opens with a question about amnesty and justice in general, not amnesty or justice in relation to a specific case:

So is amnesty being given at the cost of justice being done?

Amnesty is referred to several times in the rest of the argument, but just once through a pronoun:

the granting of amnesty
amnesty is only given to those who plead
Amnesty is not given to innocent
that amnesty was refused to the police officers who applied for it
Once amnesty is granted
The effect of amnesty is as if the offence had never happened

And that pronoun it is in fact used to refer to the only specific reference to amnesty in Tutu’s text — the specific refusal of amnesty in the case of the police officers who murdered Steve Biko:

It was on precisely this point that amnesty was refused to the police officers who applied for it for their part in the death of Steve Biko.

These specific officers on the other hand are tracked pronominally, just like the characters in Helena’s story.

to the police officers who applied for it
for their part in the death of Steve Biko
They denied that
they had committed a crime
claiming that they had assaulted him only in retaliation
for his inexplicable conduct in attacking them.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is not textual reference, but reference in the sense of ideational denotation (a nominal group realising a participant). The nominal group a murder victim does not include a reference item that presumes a recoverable identity.

[2] To be clear, this is not textual reference, but reference in the sense of ideational denotation (a nominal group realising a participant). The nominal groups amnesty and justice do not include a reference item that presumes a recoverable identity.

[3] To be clear, these are genuine instances of textual reference: the reference item it refers anaphorically to amnesty, and the items their-they-they-they-them refer anaphorically to the police officers who applied for it.

[4] As previously demonstrated, the misunderstanding of textual reference as participant tracking leads to absurdities like a speaker keeping track of herself, and keeping track of participants by not mentioning them (ellipsis).