Projected self: the de se across dimensions and beyond pronouns
This dissertation is about how attitudes de se are encoded in content outside the assertive domain, as well as by expressions which are not really pronouns, such as nouns. First of all, it provides evidence that expressives are necessarily de se, which means that non-pronominal expressions, such as nouns, verbs etc. can be de se in a non-assertive dimension. Next, it examines in full detail the landscape of expressive (or as it is more recently known, use-conditional) meaning and the extant dedicated frameworks, arguing that they are misguided, due to conceptual issues and not being restrictive enough to be theoretically meaningful. I then move to the debate of whether expressives are presuppositions or a distinct kind of meaning, arguing for a conciliatory solution which proposes that expressives are ordinary presuppositions endowed with a compositionally irrelevant, indexical kind of meaning which I call ‘associative’. This solution explains the ambivalent behaviour of expressives, i.e. that they may display filterability and non-displaceability simultaneously. The next topic is that of self-reference of Japanese, a language which lacks genuine personal pronouns and where speakers may use a multitude of expressions instead for this function: a long list of so-called personal pronouns which are actually nouns, then also common nouns and proper names. After a thorough description of the data, I offer a formal account of self-reference in Japanese, accommodating all the different kinds of expressions used. The main theoretical implication of this account is that the absolute distinction between indexicals and names is denied, as names in Japanese can encode the de se. Moreover, it is shown that Japanese so-called 1st person pronouns are de se in both dimensions, as they are used as self-referring expressions but they are also endowed with associative meaning.
de se, self-reference, expressives, expressive meaning, use-conditional meaning, Japanese, presupposition, conventional implicature, semantics, pragmatics, indexicals, indexicality, names, 1st person pronoun, self, first person
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