Time for a little more Joyce. The following passage
from Portrait has many many
virtues.

     — I meant
a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.
     — Undoubtedly, said the dean.
     — One difficulty, said Stepehn, in
esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the
literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember
a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was
detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the
marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.
     — Note in the least, said the dean
politely.
     — No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I
mean …
     — Yes, yes: I see, said the dean
quickly, I quite catch the point: detain.
     He thrust forward his under jaw and
uttered a short dry cough.
     — To return to the lamp, he said, the
feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must
be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the
funnel can hold.
     — What funnel? asked Stephen.
     — The funnel through which you pour
the oil into your lamp.
     — That? said Stephen. Is that called
a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
     — What is a tundish?
     — That. The … the funnel.
     — Is that called a tundish in
Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.
     — It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra,
said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English.
     — A tundish, said the dean
reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon
my word I must.

(The passage is from early in chapter 5, pages
157-8 of the recent OUP edition.)

I could spend all day playing with ideas about how
Stephen’s comment about tradition and the marketplace interacts with the
dominant trends in fin de siècle Australian philosophy, but let’s leave that
until a more relaxed time. And the observation about the language spoken in
Lower Drumcondra seems somewhat relevant to discussions about individualist and
communitarian theories of meaning, especially to temporal
externalist theories. I may have a little more to say about that in a week
or two, because I think I need to think a little more before writing. (I do
think I’ll be expelled from the blogworld for that last comment.)

For now I want to reflect a little on the
demonstratives at the end of the passage. Stephen twice starts his utterance
with ‘that’. In each case it looks, at first, like a demonstrative. But there
is nothing there to demonstrate, there is no tundish there for Stephen to pick
out. Nor does it pick out a particular object that has been made salient by the
conversation, for no particular tundish has been specified. There has been an
object type specified by the conversation, but that doesn’t provide the right
semantic content for the sentences Stephen utters. When he says “That [is a
tundish]” he doesn’t mean that a particular object type is a tundish, he means
that a particular type of object is a tundish. So perhaps it is a paycheck pronoun,
or what we used to call a pronoun of laziness. (As in: Sam spent her paycheck,
but Madison deposited it. The it picks
out Madison’s paycheck, not Sam’s.) This might be right, though it would be
surprising, because usually for paycheck pronouns we can specify exactly what
the pronoun stands for, and Stephen is quite unsure just what ‘that’ stands
proxy for. (“The … the funnel.”)

I don’t have any clear answer here, I’m just
observing that this is a rather tricky discourse to formally represent, no
matter how easy it is to understand what’s going on. In that spirit, what do
you think is the right formal representation of the last proposition asserted
in this little dialogue?

     — Do you
know the Ethiopian restaurant on George Street?
     — Yeah.
     — That’s where Tony Soprano got shot.

One possibility is that the final proposition is a
singular proposition saying of a particular object (as it happens, the
Ethiopian restaurant on George Street) that it’s where Tony Soprano got shot.
Another is that the final proposition is a quantified proposition, saying that
the unique Ethiopian restaurant on George Street is where Tony Soprano got
shot. The two propositions obviously have different entailments, only the
second entails that Tony Soprano got shot in an Ethiopian restaurant. I don’t
know which hypothesis is right. If it’s the second, do you think it makes a
difference if we change the ‘the’ in the first sentence to ‘that’? Would it
make a difference if the initial utterance had been an assertion, perhaps Last
night I ate at the Ethiopian restaurant on George Street,
rather than a question that does little except make the restaurant in question
salient? I don’t know, and I’m not sure how to even start answering these
questions.

It’s striking how complicated it gets applying
familiar distinctions to ordinary discourse even when the discourse is not that
complicated.

My attention was first drawn to the passage in Portrait by
the discussion of it in Jeri Johnson’s excellent introduction to the OUP
edition of Portrait. In the
annotations she notes that Stephen takes his point about the marketplace and
the literary tradition from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which isn’t a reference you’d
expect to find in an analytic philosophy discussion.