Project members

PI: Isabelle Charnavel

Post-docs: Anouk Dieuleveut and Tom Meadows

Summary of research plan

Indexicals such as English I or you raise fundamental questions for natural language semantics and its relation to pragmatics and morphosyntax: in particular, their context dependency and lack of interaction with modal and temporal operators as well as their bindability challenge the traditional architecture for sentence interpretation based on time-world parameters and an assignment function for individual variables. Beyond linguistics, their understanding has implications for philosophical, cognitive and developmental questions. For example, sentences with indexicals have a specific cognitive significance tied to their context dependency, and determining the reference of indexicals often requires the cognitive ability to impute mental states to others (theory of mind), topics actively investigated in language acquisition and cognitive development studies. The general goal of the project is to contribute to the analysis of indexicals and thus clarify some of the crucial questions that their context dependency raises. More specifically, the traditional theory of indexicals relying on dependency on a fixed context parameter (Kaplan 1977) has recently been challenged by two empirical discoveries: indexical shifting, questioning the fixity of context parameters, and indexical binding, challenging context dependency itself. In order to specify the role of context dependency in indexicals, the present project concentrates on the latter issue (e.g. only I did my homework meaning that nobody else did theirs), which still lacks both an adequate empirical description and a satisfactory analysis.

In the past 30 years, indexical binding has mostly been explored in English under two main types of approach. Morphosyntactic accounts, which focus on cases of local binding often interacting with agreement, treat bound indexicals as fake indexicals, i.e. underspecified pronouns acquiring the shape of indexicals through binding. Semantic accounts, which concentrate on the focus properties of their antecedent, derive the interpretational specificities of bound indexicals not from the indexicals themselves, but from the focus constructions in which they occur. Both types of accounts face empirical and theoretical issues, largely due to their being based on a limited set of cases. The study of bound indexicals is mostly restricted to English, except for some recent, partial crosslinguistic investigations (esp. in Germanic languages). Moreover, the examination of English lacks a systematic empirical description, and relies on a few informally collected judgments, despite the variability in judgments often noted.

The specific aim of the project is to start filling these gaps and lay the basis for an empirically robust and theoretically adequate analysis of bound indexicals. The choice of a specifically informative sample of languages of investigation from both Germanic and Romance families will allow us to conduct a very systematic and experimentally controlled study determining the licensing conditions for bound indexicals. We will compare the properties of bound indexicals in English and German, which have been partially, but not sufficiently investigated, with those in French and Italian, which have not been explored although they display morpho-syntactic properties that are uniquely suited to discriminating between the various existing analyses. This systematic quantitative and crosslinguistic study should disentangle the relevant factors at stake and build an analysis motivated both empirically and theoretically. Specifically, we will examine the role of various morphosyntactic factors (e.g. agreement, locality, structural position) and semantico-pragmatic factors (e.g. focus, ellipsis, discursive context) in indexical binding, and determine how they interact. In order to derive the behavior of bound indexicals from independent principles, we will furthermore investigate to what extent the properties of bound indexicals are observed in other phenomena. In particular, examining whether the possible binding of indexicals can be attributed to the presuppositionality of person features will require comparing indexicals with other presuppositional elements.

Beyond contributing to the theory of indexicals and its implications for linguistics and human cognition, the project will establish a permanent database for bound indexicals in four Germanic and Romance languages (a starting point for further crosslinguistic investigations) and will provide training opportunities for several students.

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