TIME: Wed 4/22 3:00pm
PLACE: 34-303
TITLE: “Presuppositions of the gender features of anaphoric pronouns”
The common wisdom about the interpretation of phi-features of pronouns is that
they contribute to the meaning the corresponding presuppositions (cf.
Heim&Kratzer 1998, Sauerland 2003, etc. etc.). Namely, a pronoun “she"
contributes presuppositions about its referent requiring it to be an atom and a
female. This particular view of the gender features goes back to Cooper's 1983
book.However, one important detail is missing: in an intensional environment where
some individual have different genders in different sets of worlds under
consideration, where must the requirement to be female be fulfilled? While the
common wisdom usually does not go that far when talking about gender features;
Cooper himself started to investigate the question and came to the conclusion
that the features of bound pronouns contribute real normal presuppositions,
while the features of free pronouns contribute a special kind of
presuppositions – indexical presuppositions, which can only be fulfilled in the
actual world.As a closer look at the relevant data shows, Cooper's was a wrong
generalization. After the discussion of relevant examples, I hope you will
agree that, first, Cooper was right saying that presuppositions associated with
gender features are special – they cannot be accommodated in the way “normal"
presuppositions usually can; secondly, that it is not only free pronouns that
trigger such special presuppositions, but bound pronouns as well – there is no
difference between the two classes (which is probably good news.) The empirical
generalizations emerging, however, seem to require a lot of work to accommodate
into current semantic frameworks. I will discuss the demands the new data makes
of the semantic theory, and will try to sketch a schema of a theory that should
be able to accommodate those.
More information, incl. the schedule for the rest of the semester, can be found here.