Split Indexicality
David Blunier
November 2024 

Since Kaplan (1977), it is generally assumed that indexicality should be conceived as an inherent property of a subclass of context-dependent elements such as I, you, here or now - namely, those elements referring directly to (some parameter of) the utterance context. Focusing on two different phenomena involving the morphological category of person - shiftable indexicals (SIs) and logophoric pronouns (LPs) -, I argue that indexicality is not a property of discrete lexical forms, but that of a morphological feature, ACTUAL, which can combine with other features in the person paradigm in a constrained fashion. On this account, inspired by Schlenker (2003), indexical pronouns in languages such as English are elements which morphosemantic makeup involves a feature ACTUAL, restricting their potential referents to those of the utterance context. By contrast, SIs and LPs in languages such as Tigrinya or Ewe lack an ACTUAL feature, allowing their referents to be participants of reported contexts in attitude reports. This featural approach, combined with the appropriate competition mechanism, is able to explain most of the distributional and interpretive similarities between SIs and LPs, such as their common inference-triggering profile, where the choice of a standard, 3rd person pronominal element over either a LP/SI leads to a disjointness inference, excluding reference to the author of the report.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008609 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	indexicals, logophors, person features, pronouns, attitude reports, disjointness effects, maximize presupposition!, semantics, morphology
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