of how discourses are constructed, plus our knowledge of whatever special literary or scholarly or other conventions pertain to the genre in question, plus our knowledge of what the writer is likely to have meant, and so on.”
4. From a presentation by Christopher Manning, https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs224n/cs224n.1162/handouts/cs224n-lecture10-coreference.pdf.
5. Wiktionary.
6. Hobbs, “Resolving pronoun references.”
7. Dominance is a primitive of syntactic analysis, which interprets sentence structure in terms of “trees,” with dominant nodes higher up in the structure than dominated ones.
8. Lappin and Leass, “An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution.”
9. I checked the first two of these examples with a user of Stanford CoreNLP tagger, a state of the art neural system, who told me it got them both wrong. However, the Hobb algorithm gets the “Seth” one right.
10. For example, Latin sibi, Greek ἑαυτοῦ. Hebrew uses a different way of expressing the reflexive.
11. I have used a translation consistent with the Hebrew, which uses pronouns only. Some translations resolve the difficulty of interpretation by use of the proper name, for example, NIV “At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him.”
12. Silverman, From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision, 86.
13. Other than Mary Magdalene, of course, since there were only two Marys at the tomb. Mary, mother of Jesus, was not present at that point, although confusingly she also had sons called James and Joseph, common names in first-century Galilee.
14. John of Damascus, De Haeresibus, 766, Niketas of Byzantium, Confutatio dogmatum Mahomedis, 790.
15. Exodus 15:20. If the “Imran” mentioned in Surah 3 is not the father of Moses, how did Muhammad discover the name? The father of Mary is not named in the New Testament, although Christian tradition knows him as “Joachim.” If the author was using a name familiar to his readers, they would associate it with Imran the father of Moses. Otherwise it would be meaningless, unless there was a tradition in the Near East about Mary’s father, but history is so far silent about that.
16. The Quran (3:7) says that some of its verses are specific, others ambiguous, whose meaning is known only to God. “Those whose hearts are infected with disbelief observe the ambiguous part.”
17. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, 206.
18. See also Esposito, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, 136, on the tradition that Mary’s father was also called Imran.
19. Sahih Muslim (transl. Siddiqi) Book 25, Hadith 5326 “When I came to Najran, they (the Christians of Najran) asked me: You read ‘Sister of Harun’, (i.e. Mary), in the Qur’an, whereas Moses was born well before Jesus. When I came back to Allah’s Messenger I asked him about that, and he said: ‘The (people of the old age) used to give names (to their persons) after the names of Apostle and pious persons who had gone before them.’”
20. Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir, Vol. 2, 29–30, “Allah also chose the household of Imran, the father of Maryam bint Imran, the mother of `Isa [Jesus], peace be upon them. So `Isa [Jesus] is from the offspring of Ibrahim, as we will mention in the Tafsir of Surah Al-An`am, Allah willing, and our trust is in Him.”
21. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (trans. Michael Silverthorne, Jonathan Israel), 7, 136.
22. A further difficulty is that in 19:28, Mary is called the sister of Aaron, who was the brother of Moses. Dawood says “sister” here means a virtuous woman. According to Hughes (Dictionary of Islam, 328), Al-Baidawi says she was called “sister of Aaron” because she was of Levitical race; but Husain says that the Aaron mentioned in the verse is not the same person as the brother of Moses.
23. Sale, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed, 56.
24. Strictly speaking, the author or authors, or editors.
25. This basic assumption is occasionally violated. Moses is supposed to be the author of the whole of the Pentateuch. But as Spinoza points out (Theological-Political Treatise, 8.3, trans. Michael Silverthorne, Jonathan Israel, 119), the words of Deuteronomy 31.9 “and Moses wrote the Law” cannot be the words of Moses, but rather of another writer who has temporarily forgotten that he is writing as if he were Moses. The author of Genesis 12.6 says “the Canaanite at that time was in the land,” forgetting that if he had been writing at that time, rather than later, the Canaanite would still be in the land.
26. An exception being the phenomenon of “bridging”: I saw a house. The roof had a hole in it.
27. Basset, “Apollonius between Homeric and Hellenistic Greek: The case of the ‘Pre-positive Article’” in Matthaios, ed., 260. A cold opening (or: in medias res) is a literary device that deliberately flouts this rule. For example, “It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp” (William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, 1948); “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad” (Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche, 1921); “She might have been waiting for her lover” (Graham Greene, England Made Me, 1935). Strawson (“On referring,” 331) calls it the “spurious” use of the definite article, claiming that sophisticated fiction depends on it, as opposed to the “unsophisticated kind” which begins “once upon a time there was . . .” The technique suggests the earlier part of a text has been lost, as though a page or two is missing, and hence the co-reference is missing. The use of a definite article in the first verse of a work of fiction implies a semantic dependence on some antecedent that is simply not available. The same is true of complete definite descriptions like “tallest girl in the class,” or indeed “son of God.”
28. That is, demonstratives that involve pointing or gestures or other actions external to the text.
29. Intellectum constituere: literally to create or establish understanding.
30. Essentially the same point is made in Kripke “Speaker’s reference and semantic reference” (262), who distinguishes what a speaker’s words mean, in a specific context, and what he actually meant, or intended, on that occasion.
31. Strawson, Individuals, 15–16.
32. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have human narrators. However, the central narrator of the Quran purports to be Allah himself.
33. Kripke calls this semantic reference (“Speaker’s reference and semantic reference,” passim).
34. Scotus used the term haecitas only twice: see Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, Libri VI–IX, 7.13 n61, p. 240 and 7.13 n176, p. 278, but his followers popularised it under the spelling “haecceitas.”
35. Plantinga, “A Boethian compromise,” 137.
36. See Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of Existence, 97–104 for other compelling arguments against Plantinga-style haecceity properties.
37. E.g. Searle, “Proper names.”
38. Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1979), 322–3. Mill’s example is “Caesar.”
