Counterfactual De Se
Hazel Pearson
June 2017
 

This paper addresses a long-standing debate concerning the derivation of de se construals. One camp holds that there is a dedicated mechanismof ‘de se binding’, which results in a de se pronoun being interpreted as a variable ranging over the doxastic alternatives of the attitude holder (e.g. Chierchia 1990). Another treats de se as a special case of de re under the acquaintance relation of identity (e.g.Lewis 1979, Reinhart 1990). This debate is premised on the assumption that the two different routes to de se result in identical truth conditions. I argue that this assumption is incorrect for a class of cases that can be delineated in a principled fashion — counterfactual attitude reports involving counter-identity, such as 'Ivanka imagined that she was Melania and she was giving an interview'. The argument builds on Ninan2008, who noticed that de re construal works differently with counterfactual attitudes, and that this has consequences for de se interpretation in this type of sentence. I spell out these consequences more precisely, drawing ona novel, crosslinguistically robust generalisation about unambiguously de seexpressions such as PRO (the ‘De Se Generalization’). I argue that a treatment of such expressions that appeals to de se-as-de re cannot account for the De Se Generalization in a principled way, and hence that a dedicated mechanism of de se binding must be included among the expressive resources of the grammar
Format: [ file ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008532
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Semantics and Pragmatics
keywords: attitude reports, de se, de re, counterfactual attitudes, obligatory control, indexical shift, semantics
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