Grammatical definition of a phrase?

July 27, 2020 10:31 PM

In this quote by E. H. Carr [ (1961). What is history?. Penguin UK] "The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fish monger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him" How would you describe the phrase "the historian", assuming as I am that he is thinking about a generic historian or group, not an actual single one. In the same circumstances, I would write "facts are available to historians". See?
posted by b33j to Writing & Language (7 answers total)

It's a famous quote, and 'the historian' here is just the indirect object of the sentence (where 'the facts' are the direct object). His formulation is metaphor whereas yours is more purely descriptive; historians as a generic group don't go to the fish market. Carr's essay is deliberately making this about a direct relationship of historian-to-facts, definitely thinking about a single, admittedly imaginary historian, because the rest of the argument is about that individual's choices. The slight difference in meaning between your expression and Carr's is that it's less suggestive, in yours, that every historian will choose different fish from the slab, and serve a different recipe.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:56 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ooh I can answer this one - I've studied this phenomena while writing a PhD in linguistics and have in fact done empirical research on it in multiple languages. Linguists call this "genericity" and the form in this sentence, with a singular definite article, is one way of expressing genericity in English. The more common form, however, is what we call the "bare plural", which is to say a plural noun without an article, such as "historians". Generics in English are more commonly expressed as bare plurals, and speakers tend to view the definite singular form as slightly archaic, or conveying an aphorism. Other languages use different forms to express genericity, for example French uses the definite plural, as in "the historians", which does not have a generic reading in English. And languages without articles tend to encode the generic reading contextually.

The analysis of genericity is a really fascinating but simple puzzle: the sentence 'birds fly' in English seems to be true, but what does it mean? It can't mean "all birds fly" because speakers will reject that as false, immediately after accepting that 'birds fly' is true. It can't mean 'most birds fly' because the generic form doesn't seem to work in other sentences where 'most X' is demonstrably true, such as 'books are paperbacks' (most books are in fact paperback) which speakers don't seem to accept. And then 'ticks carry lyme disease' seems to be true, but only a small fraction of ticks are carriers. What's going on? I tried for years to answer this question.

If you're interested in reading more, a good start is the SEP article on Generic Generalizations.
posted by tractorfeed at 11:21 PM on July 27, 2020 [33 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you both!
posted by b33j at 11:43 PM on July 27, 2020

Best answer: This kind of, let's call it "exemplary genericity" -- thanks, tractorfeed! -- is very common in somewhat formal early/mid-20th century writing, though it goes back much further. It tends to be used towards those who share a profession or vocation or some kind of common identity in reference to their thinking or acting as individuals rather than in explicitly collaborative or collective situations.

For instance, TS Eliot: "What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

Or George Orwell using both forms: "For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the issue very well."

The poet or the peasant is typically a 'he', as in those two passages, which is one reason why this generic form has faded from use after a late 20th-c phase of working through 'he or she' or singular 'they'.

In some ways, it's operating in the opposite direction from the modern (esp. British) metonymic shift towards using plural verbs with collective nouns when emphasising the group's individual members, e.g. "the orchestra is playing a concert" vs. "the orchestra are getting drunk after the concert."
posted by holgate at 11:53 PM on July 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

If wanted to have something closer to the same meaning but without the archaic feel, you would say "each historian", because that retains the sense that the individual is making choices of how to arrange the facts. Saying simply "historians" loses that.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:50 AM on July 28, 2020

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:12 AM on July 28, 2020

Consider this example: "a horse" is any animal of that species, "the horse" can be used to refer to the animal you are about to ride, and "horses" is the plural which may refer to a given group or to the animal as a concept. More formal writing often reverts to "the horse" when referring to the animal as a concept without reference to an individual animal.
posted by yclipse at 4:44 PM on July 28, 2020