Personal pronoun revisionism (so-called by Olson, E. 2007. What are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press) is a response to the problem of the thinking animal on behalf of the neo-Lockean theorist. Many worry about this response. The worry rests on asking the wrong question, namely: how can two thinkers that are so alike differ in this way in their cognitive capacities? This is the wrong question because they don't. The right question is: how (...) can they fail to be the same? From the materialist viewpoint shared by the animalist and neo-Lockean they can't. Personal pronoun revisionism is a consequence of their cognitive identity. (shrink)

The present study consists of a description of the functions of the personal pronoun attested in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Gospels. Inferences are drawn from the way the pronoun is employed in the translation of various Greek grammatical expressions and from comparing the instances of some Aramaic expressions that can occur with or without the pronoun.

The current study investigated the production of third-person subject and object pronouns in monolingual and bilingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) and typical language development (TLD). Furthermore, it evaluated the underlying linguistic and nonlinguistic prerequisites of pronoun use, by assessing the role of morpho-syntactic skills, Theory of Mind abilities, working memory and inhibition on pronoun use. A total of 85 children aged 4;6-9;2 participated in four groups: 27 children with HFA (14 monolingual (monoHFA) and 13 bilingual (biHFA)), and (...) 58 children with TLD (28 monolingual (monoTLD) and 30 bilingual (biTLD)). All children spoke Hebrew and the bilingual children spoke Russian as their Heritage Language. Third-person subject and object pronouns were elicited in Hebrew. The results yielded no effect of bilingualism and a robust effect of HFA for the use of pronouns. Bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children paired up with their monolingual Hebrew-speaking peers in pronominal use in Hebrew. Monolingual and bilingual children with TLD showed nearly ceiling performance on pronoun use. The facilitative effect of pronominal acquisition in Hebrew among bilingual children was attributed to similarities in the pronominal systems of the two languages of bilingual children. Age was found to be a predictive factor of pronoun use in children with TLD. Conversely, children with HFA had a lower rate of pronoun production compared to the TLD groups. Both third-person subject and object pronouns were largely predicted by morpho-syntactic abilities of children with HFA. In addition, subject pronoun use was predicted by ToM skills and working memory confirming that pronoun use is a complex phenomenon, which requires integration of multiple linguistic and nonlinguistic components. To conclude, our findings suggest that morpho-syntactic development is a prerequisite for third-person subject and object pronoun use in children with HFA, and ToM and working memory are involved in third-person subject pronoun use. In addition, we show that pronoun use is not compromised by dual language exposure in children with TLD and with HFA. (shrink)

: Traditional accounts regard the first-person pronoun as a special token-reflexive indexical whose referent, the utterer, is identified by the linguistic rule expressed by the term plus the context of utterance. This view falls short in accounting for all the I-uses in narrative practices, a domain broader than fiction including storytelling, pretense, direct speech reports, delayed communication, the historical present, and any other linguistic act in which the referent of the indexical is not perceptually accessible to the receiver. I propose (...) a model for the reference of “I” based on the distinction between three functions carried out by indexicals in communication, namely, the anaphoric, perceptual, and phantasmatic functions. The referential mechanism of the phantasmatic “I”, that is, the “I” used in phantasmatic function, is understood as an instance of imagination-oriented pointing exploiting the phantasmatic context, and not the perceptual context relevant in perceptual uses of indexicals. The rule for “I” is revised in light of the perceptual vs. phantasmatic deixis distinction; the resulting rule governing the reference of the phantasmatic “I” allows for a homogeneous treatment of ‘I’-tokens in narrative practices spanning the spectrum from fiction to non-fiction. Keywords : First-person Pronoun; Context; Imagination; Fiction; Indexicals; Narration; L'io fantasmatico. Sull’uso immaginativo del pronome di prima persona tra finzione e realtà Riassunto : Tradizionalmente “io” viene trattato come un indicale token-riflessivo speciale il cui referente, il produttore dell’occorrenza, è identificato attraverso la sola regola linguistica e il contesto di proferimento. Questo approccio, tuttavia, non riesce a rendere conto di quei casi in cui “io” appare all’interno di pratiche di narrazione, un dominio più ampio della finzione e che include lo storytelling, i racconti in discorso diretto e indiretto, la comunicazione differita, il presente storico e ogni altro atto linguistico in cui il referente indicale non è percettivamente accessibile al ricevente. Il modello per il riferimento di “io” qui proposto si basa sulla distinzione tra tre funzioni svolte dagli indicali nella comunicazione: la funzione anaforica, la funzione percettiva, e la funzione fantasmatica. Il meccanismo referenziale dell’io fantasmatico, ovvero del pronome di prima persona usato in funzione fantasmatica, è inteso come una istanza di deissi orientata dall’immaginazione che sfrutta il contesto fantasmatico, piuttosto che il contesto percettivo rilevante negli usi percettivi degli indicali. La regola per “io” è riformulata alla luce della distinzione tra deissi fantasmatica e deissi percettiva; la risultante regola per il riferimento indicale dell’io fantasmatico permette un trattamento omogeneo delle occorrenze di “io” nelle pratiche di narrazione che pertengono indistintamente alla finzione e alla realtà. Parole chiave : Pronome di prima persona; Contesto; Immaginazione; Finzione; Indicali; Narrazione. (shrink)

In his book, Eric Olson (2007) makes some criticisms of a response to the problem of the thinking animal (also called the ‘too many minds’ or ‘too many thinkers’ problem) which I have offered, on behalf of the neo-Lockean psychological continuity theorist. Olson calls my proposal ‘personal pronoun revisionism’ (though I am not suggesting any revision). In what follows I shall say what my proposal actually is, defend it and briefly respond to Olson's criticism.

In classical Chinese wu 吾 is commonly employed as the first-person pronoun, similar to wo 我 that retains its use in modern Chinese. Although these two words are usually understood as stylistic variants of “I,” “me,” and “myself,” Chinese scholars of the Zhuangzi 莊子 have long been aware of the possible differences in their semantics, especially in the philosophical context of discussing the relation between the self and the person, as evinced by their occurrences in the much-discussed line “Now I (...) have lost myself” in the chapter “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”. In this essay, I first provide an exegesis of the proffered explanations of the semantical differences between wu and wo as an introduction to two ways of understanding them in the Zhuangzi literature, viz. the single-reference view and the double-reference view. Then I shall argue against these two views in favor of the no-reference view, meaning that both pronouns in “Now I have lost myself” do not function referentially, given the peculiarity of the verb “lose.” I believe the no-reference view has not been explicitly articulated and defended in the literature, although some scholars who want to read the no-self view into the Zhuangzi might have implied it. My argument is supported by a close reading of the targeted passage in the Zhuangzi, premised on the assumption that the part on the “piping of Heaven” immediately following the discussion of losing oneself is an indirect explanation rather than a digression. My explanation is framed within a similar discussion of “I” by the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. This comparative interpretation, I believe, not only provides the grounds for understanding Zhuangzi’s ideal of attaining the state where “the ten thousand things are one with me,” but also demonstrates how metaphysics and the philosophy of language are two interwoven threads in Zhuangzi’s reasoning. (shrink)

Two central assumptions of current models of language acquisition were addressed in this study: (1) knowledge of linguistic structure is "mapped onto" earlier forms of non-linguistic knowledge; and (2) acquiring a language involves a continuous learning sequence from early gestural communication to linguistic expression. The acquisition of the first and second person pronouns ME and YOU was investigated in a longitudinal study of two deaf children of deaf parents learning American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language. Personal (...) pronouns in ASL are formed by pointing directly to the addressee (YOU) or self (I or ME), rather than by arbitrary symbols. Thus, personal pronouns in ASL resemble paralinguistic gestures that commonly accompany speech and are used prelinguistically by both hearing and deaf children beginning around 9 months. This provides a means for investigating the transition from prelinguistic gestural to linguistic expression when both gesture and language reside in the same modality.\nThe results indicate that deaf children acquired knowledge of personal pronouns over a period of time, displaying errors similar to those of hearing children despite the transparency of the pointing gestures. The children initially (ages 10 and 12 months) pointed to persons, objects, and locations. Both children then exhibited a long avoidance period, during which one function of the pointing gesture (pointing to self and others) dropped out completely. During this period their language and cognitive development were otherwise entirely normal, and they continued to use other types of pointing (e.g., to objects). When pointing to self and others returned, it was marked with errors typical of hearing children; one child exhibited consistent pronoun reversal errors, thinking the YOU point referred to herself, while the other child exhibited reversal errors inconsistently. Evidence from experimental tasks conducted with the first child revealed that pronoun errors occurred in comprehension as well. Full control of the ME and YOU pronouns was not achieved until 25-27 months, around the same time when hearing children master these forms. Thus, the study provides evidence for a discontinuity in the child's transition from prelinguistic to linguistic communication. It is argued that aspects of linguistic structure and its acquisition appear to involve distinct, language-specific knowledge. (shrink)

It is well known that Charles S. Peirce's first attempt to construct a theory of metaphysical categories, already displaying the triadic pattern that would later become the keystone of his philosophy, directed itself towards the three English personal pronouns: I, IT, THOU.2 As many scholars have already noted, these three spheres of the phenomenal world identified by the young Peirce prelude to the 1867 "New List" (Quality, Relation and Representation) as well as to the later categories of Firstness, (...) Secondness and Thirdness.But apart from their documentary significance as the seed of Peircean metaphysics, the writings on I, IT and THOU also have a philosophical interest in their own right, one which deserves to.. (shrink)

The little francophone community of Port-au-Port Peninsula in Newfoundland is particularly representative of non-standard French spoken in North America. This paper tries to elaborate a grammatical analysis in order to justify the transcriptions of verb forms in the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de Terre-Neuve. In the sentence “I passait les maisons, [bladʒe] ac le monde”, for instance, [bladʒe] could be interpreted as “blaguait” or “blaguer.” In standard French, the same sentence could be translated as “il allait de porte en porte parler (...) avec les gens” or “il allait de porte en porte, parlait avec les gens.” The omission of the subject pronoun seems to allow the transition toward a unmarked verb form either under a short form, limited to the radical of the verb, without any flexional mark like an imperative form, or a full form, like what Remacle calls “infinitif substitut.” The last stade of this evolution is the nominal phrase, whose use is widely spread in popular French, where it often follows a verb phrase. (shrink)

This paper presents the philosophical theory underpinning an empirical study that found changes in the semantic usage of first person pronouns by recovering psychotherapy patients. The philosophical theory provided semantic variables that could serve as markers of recovery. It derived from the semantic theory by Gottlob Frege and the logic of relations, and accounts for the meaning expressed by the first person pronouns as distinct from their syntax and pragmatic symbolization. This distinction is worthwhile because empirical evidence was (...) found for change in the meaning expressed by these pronouns during recovery, but not for change in their syntax or pragmatic symbolization. Philosophical work on the concepts of illness and recovery was used to deduce that the semantic variables are markers of recovery in general rather than in psychotherapy only. As with the empirical study, the semantic variables were shown to change as follows when someone recovers: occupancy of alpha positions is taken up and occupancy of omega positions is relinquished. Potential applications of these findings were examined by which the tracking of the semantic variables may serve to improve the clinician's understanding of a patient, monitor a patient's progress, and enhance recovery. (shrink)

It is common practice in formal semantics to assume that the context specifies an assignment of values to variables and that the same variables that receive contextually salient values when they occur free may also be bound by quantifiers and λs. These assumptions are at work to provide a unified account of free and bound uses of third person pronouns, namely one by which the same lexical item is involved in both uses. One way to pursue this account is (...) to treat quantifiers and λs as monsters in Kaplan’s sense. We argue that this move should be avoided and explore an alternative route based on the idea that there is a variable assignment coordinate in the context and a variable assignment coordinate in the circumstance of evaluation, with the definition of truth in context identifying them. One fundamental challenge that arises in pursuing a unified account is to explain the difference in the way the gender presuppositions of bound and free pronouns project. The proposal that emerges from the attempt to meet this challenge is a non-indexical account of free third person pronouns and a new conception of the role and structure of assignment functions. (shrink)

Consumers often feel embarrassed when buying products like condoms, hemorrhoid cream, and beriberi cream in crowded pharmacies. There is an interesting phenomenon in life: Some beriberi creams use the images of a “real foot”, while others use the images of a “cartoon foot.” Imagine if a young woman needed to go to a retail store for beriberi cream that would embarrass her, she would choose a “real foot image” or a “cartoon foot image” beriberi cream? It has been shown that (...) the embarrassment of these products has a strong negative impact on consumer buying behavior. Previous researches have explored how changing packaging elements of embarrassing products can effectively reduce consumer embarrassment. However, few have examined the impact of different image types of embarrassing product packaging with embarrassment. Therefore, this research explores the effect of image types on consumers’ willingness to purchase embarrassing products and reveals the mechanisms of the underlying effects. The results show that natural images can lead to lower purchase intention of embarrassing products when the advertisement uses first-person pronouns due to the mediating role played by negative body imagery. However, there is no significant difference in purchase intention between different image types in the third-person pronouns. Finally, this paper discusses its contributions and limitations. (shrink)

Christ, the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity, uses the first-person pronoun in a "declarative" manner in speaking to the Father, and thus reveals the difference of persons within the Holy Trinity. A purely third-person revelation would not enjoy the same literalness and depth; the Trinity could not have been as clearly revealed by, say, a prophet. Christ makes it possible for the believer also to use the first person declaratively in addressing God. The declarative use of the first-person pronoun (...) expresses the speaker’s personhood, his status as an agent of truth. (shrink)

Analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would do so and so...” create a puzzle for philosophical semantics. Whereas the ‘received view' in philosophical semantics has it that the first person pronoun always refers to its utterer, one may wonder whether this is still the case when the first person pronoun is embedded in analogical counterfactuals such as “If I were you, I would stay away from me”. I suggest that the intelligibility of lies in the fact that (...) the token of the expression ‘I' in the consequent of the counterfactual does not refer to its utterer. Should one then conclude, following the ‘anaphoric theory' that the second occurrence of ‘I' in does refer to its addressee? For the ‘anaphoric theory', ‘I' in ‘I would stay away from me' refers anaphorically, thanks to the linguistic context, to the referent of ‘you' in ‘If I were you'. On the basis of an analysis of the imaginative project involved in uttering a practical advise in the form of, I suggest contra the ‘anaphoric theory' that the first pronoun ‘I' in the consequent of behaves as an indexical and that its content is obtained by the application of its character to a pretend context differing from the context of its utterance. According to the so-called ‘pretence theory', the first person pronoun in its second occurrence in pretends to refer to a fictional composite of the utterer and the addressee. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 127-129 [Access article in PDF] Linguistic Markers of Recovery:Underpinnings of First Person Pronoun Usage and Semantic Positions of Patients Patrick Suppes Keywords: association, freedom, habits, psychotherapy, roles, semantics. USING LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE to evaluate recovering psychotherapy patients is an attractive and useful idea. I agree with much of Dr. van Staden's proposals for doing so. The purpose of this commentary is to give some (...) comments and criticisms on points of detail. Roles, Not Semantics A fair amount of Dr. van Staden's article is concerned with the semantics of relations. The focus on relations is a good thing. Restricting discourse about patients to properties is not sufficient, for everyone regards how a person is relating to others, and even to other things, as an important feature of normal behavior and mental health. We do not want just to report, "John was upset," but consider it definitely more informative to say, "John was upset by his father's criticisms." The English language and all other natural languages are rich in verbs for expressing relations with emotional affect between two or more persons, or a person and an event or thing. Staden's article focuses on the interesting and important case of first person pronouns. To go from saying, "She made me do it" to "I did it" is, for reasons that need not be spelled out, a sign of progress. A way to describe this change is that the speaker has indicated that in the implicit context assumed he or she has shown signs of moving from the role of being a patient to that of being an actor, from being a recipient of actions to being a performer of acts.van Staden concentrates on the semantics of relations to bring out what I call the change of roles. I would certainly agree that such change of roles is important to the semantics of affective or action verbs and verb phrases. We have no disagreement at all about this. Yet I am critical of his wanting to range much wider in his analysis of semantics. The logical or formal treatment of relations is a large topic, full of many distinctions and subtleties that seem to me not too relevant to his main theme. In a very general way he wants to say that what is usually thought of as [End Page 127] the first position in a relation, what he calls the alpha position, is occupied by the owner of the relation, and the second position, in a binary relation—the main case discussed—is occupied by the accidental to that particular relation. This second position is called the omega position.This runs contrary to much of the mathematical literature on relations, which occupy an important place in many parts of mathematics such as geometry. So when we say that one triangle is larger than another, it seems positively weird to say the second triangle is somehow accidental to the relation. But this is true and confusing even for the familiar and classical kinds of actions often cited by van Staden. In analyzing the sentence "Brutus killed Caesar intentionally" it sounds really strange to say that Caesar occupied the accidental position in the expressed relation of killing.Moreover, in the conceptual and philosophical discussion of relations, it is common practice to stress that even if the natural grammar of a sentence has a subject-predicate structure, as in "Elizabeth is the mother of Charles," no special logical force is given to what van Staden calls the first or alpha position in most mathematical relations, such as "The number 2 is less than the number 3," expressed in ordinary mathematical notation as "2 < 3."On the other hand, I stress that it is natural to distinguish in a relational sentence expressing an action between the role of actor and the role of patient, no matter which is the grammatical subject of the sentence, as in the following pair "John hurt Mary" and "Mary was hurt by John." The roles of actor... (shrink)

Based on 24 hours of videotaped data, this study investigates, both qualitatively and quantitatively, gender differences in the use of person pronouns in televised sports in Taiwan. This analysis has found that, regardless of their speaker role, male sports reporters use the second-person singular pronoun nimuch more frequently than their female counterparts. In addition, there is a significant difference in the distribution ofpragmatic functions of nibetween men’s and women’s reporting. While male sports reporters use niin a more varied way, (...) i.e. to refer to the TV audience, a specific athlete or team, an indefinite or non-specific athlete, or to include this pronoun in direct speech to dramatize their reporting, female reporters use this pronoun predominately to referto a non-specific athlete. In other words, male sports reporters tend to employ impersonal niand dramatic nito signal their strong self-involvement, their interpersonal involvement with the athlete and the TV audience, and their involvement with the reported sports event. Finally, malesports reporters’ more frequent use of the second-person pronoun niin the data also marks their informal and conversational speech style.This result contradicts those previous studies which claim that formality and detachment characterize men’s information-oriented public discourse. (shrink)

Gender-inclusive language, such as the Swedish pronoun hen, may aid in breaking a binary notion of gender and avoid sexism. The present study followed the implementation of a gender-inclusive third-person pronoun singular in Swedish in two surveys with representative samples in 2015 and in 2018. The surveys comprised measures of attitudes toward, and use of, hen as well as possible predictors such as area of residence, age, preferred pronoun, political orientation, and interest in gender issues. Results showed that attitudes toward (...) hen became more positive and that use of hen increased between 2015 and 2018. About half of the population used hen in their communication in 2018, which is a 14-percentage-point increase from 2015. Younger age, she or hen as preferred pronoun, political left-wing orientation, and interest in gender issues predicted a more positive attitude and a more frequent use. Furthermore, the positive change between 2015 and 2018 was larger among younger people, indicating that hen will remain in the Swedish language. The present research is unique in that it follows a gender-fair language initiative during its implementation in representative samples, thereby providing insights for social movements aiming for gender-fair language. We also discuss the theoretical implications of a gender-inclusive pronoun in comparison with past studies on gender-fair language. (shrink)

In this article we will study the pronominal system in Ortonese, which belongs to the central-southern Italo-Romance languages. The analysis we propose is contrastive: we will compare the data with the Italian to highlight their differences in terms of some morphosyntactic aspects. We will examine, the stressed and unstressed personal pronouns, emphasizing the placement of the combined pronouns with the compound tenses. Then, we will focus on the rest of the pronouns, such as demonstratives, possessives, quantifiers (...) and indefinites, also pointing out the uses of the clitics “ci” and “ne” and the presence of the pronoun “nome”, which does not exist in Italian. (shrink)

When faced with an ambiguous pronoun, an addressee must interpret it by identifying a suitable referent. It has been proposed that the interpretation of pronouns can be captured using Bayes’ Rule: P ∝ PP. This approach has been successful in English and Mandarin Chinese. In this study, we further the cross-linguistic evidence for the Bayesian model by applying it to German personal and demonstrative pronouns, and provide novel quantitative support for the model by assessing model performance in (...) a Bayesian statistical framework that allows implementation of a fully hierarchical structure, providing the most conservative estimates of uncertainty. Data from two story-continuation experiments showed that the Bayesian model overall made more accurate predictions for pronoun interpretation than production and next-mention biases separately. Furthermore, the model accounts for the demonstrative pronoun dieser as well as the personal pronoun, despite the demonstrative having different, and more rigid, resolution preferences. (shrink)

Traditionally, pronouns are treated as ambiguous between bound and demonstrative uses. Bound uses are non-referential and function as bound variables, and demonstrative uses are referential and take as a semantic value their referent, an object picked out jointly by linguistic meaning and a further cue—an accompanying demonstration, an appropriate and adequately transparent speaker’s intention, or both. In this paper, we challenge tradition and argue that both demonstrative and bound pronouns are dependent on, and co-vary with, antecedent expressions. Moreover, (...) the semantic value of a pronoun is never determined, even partly, by extra-linguistic cues; it is fixed, invariably and unambiguously, by features of its context of use governed entirely by linguistic rules. We exploit the mechanisms of Centering and Coherence theories to develop a precise and general meta-semantics for pronouns, according to which the semantic value of a pronoun is determined by what is at the center of attention in a coherent discourse. Since the notions of attention and coherence are, we argue, governed by linguistic rules, we can give a uniform analysis of pronoun resolution that covers bound, demonstrative, and even discourse bound readings. Just as the semantic value of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ is conventionally set by a particular feature of its context of use—namely, the speaker—so too, we will argue, the semantic values of other pronouns, including ‘he’, are conventionally set by particular features of the context of use. (shrink)

This paper looks at an approach to Principle C in which the disjoint reference effect triggered by definite description arises because there is a preference for using bound pronouns in those cases. Philippe Schlenker has linked this approach to the idea that the NP part of a definite description should be the most minimal in content relative to a certain communicative goal. On a popular view about what the syntax and semantics of a personal pronoun is, that should (...) have the effect of favoring a pronoun over a definite description. This paper shows how that can be made the source of “Vehicle Change,” an effect in ellipsis contexts in which definite descriptions seem to behave like pronouns. It requires, however, a way of distinguishing bound pronouns from non-bound pronouns, and the paper makes a proposal about how these two kinds of pronouns can be distinguished in the way needed. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were (...) asked to evaluate different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

Beyond Reference and Designation: On Interactive Implications of the Pronoun I in English Using English-language material the paper aims to elaborate a theoretical model for the study of personal pronouns which could account for those uses of pronouns that go beyond their typical deictic function of indicating speech-event participants. The proposed analysis focuses on the following two usage types of the pronoun I: I say, there are lots of places to see there; I tell you, John is (...) the one to rely on. It is argued that despite idiomatic boundedness of the pronoun I in the expressions I say and I tell you the pronoun does contribute to the pragmatic effects of the utterances in and, namely, the effects of attention seeking and persuasion respectively. It is assumed that these effects could be attributed to interactive implications of the pronoun I that typically emerge in situations of dialogic discourse. To account for interactive orientedness of the first-person pronoun the paper puts forward two interrelated hypotheses. First, it is supposed that the first-person pronoun functions as a sign which is indexed to four regular contexts: referential context, perceptual context, the context of the speaker's subjective experiences, the context of interaction. Second, it is hypothesized that interactive implications of the pronoun I are introduced into oral discourse due to the interplay of two or more of the postulated contexts. Both hypotheses are further substantiated with reference to examples of oral discourse drawn from English-language fiction. (shrink)

The present study examined the behavioral effects of the first-person possessive pronoun. In each trial, a noun was presented to participants after visual presentation of a possessive pronoun “wo de” or “ta de” , which formed ownership. Half participants were assigned to contextual encoding condition in which they were required to judge whether they liked the item expressed by a noun from the first or third-person perspective. The rest were assigned to perceptual encoding condition in which they were asked to (...) judge what color the noun was. A subsequent recall test was performed. The results showed that there were significant memory and response advantages for nouns in “my” ownership under both conditions. The results were discussed with reference to self-specificity and other effects in the current study. (shrink)

Certain anaphoric forms are widely supposed to give rise to ‘de se’ interpretations. Castanteda (1966a/b, 1967) argues that intensive reflexive anaphors such as ‘he himself’ and ‘she herself’ act as devices for the indirect report of essentially ‘first person’ contents when they occur with singular antecedents. In this paper, I argue that first and third person pronouns that occur as anaphors on c-commanding quantified antecedents (so-called ‘bound variable pronouns’) also give rise to de se interpretations. I draw out (...) a problem that this observation raises for a well-accepted account according to which bound pronouns occur as featureless variables. I argue that the best way to account for de se interpretations of bound first and third person pronouns is to abandon the view that pronouns lack features when bound. I offer a new account of bound pronominal anaphora which assigns the features of pronouns a crucial role in deriving bound readings. (shrink)

A homonymy analysis is proposed to explain the so-called “demonstrative use” of personal pronouns. This analysis explains why some pronouns (_it_) do not allow a demonstrative use, as demonstrated in Nunberg (1993). The absence of a demonstrative feature in _it_ can also account for the fact that it does not allow deferred reference. It is argued on the basis of the structure of the nominal demonstrative paradigm that the homonymy analysis is more parsimonious than a single-item analysis.

Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensitive optimizations, showing that uni-directionality of optimization, when combined with non-adult-like constraint rankings, explains (...) the general acquisition pattern of 3rd person pronouns. Building on a specific analysis of assigning 3rd person reference by computing over alternatives (Heim 1991 ), we show that adult interpretation does not require bidirectional OT although it is fully compatible with it. What matters for comprehension in the domain investigated here is constraint ranking. (shrink)

The traditional account of first-person thought draws conclusions about this type of thinking from claims made about the first-person pronoun. In this paper I raise a worry for the traditional account. Certain uses of 'I' conflict with its conception of the linguistic data. I argue that once the data is analysed correctly, the traditional approach to first-person thought cannot be maintained.

Ken Safir, Rutgers University Following a line of thought initiated by Kuno (1972), it has been suggested that the coconstrual of first person pronouns is a model for the coconstrual of a logophoric pronoun with its antecedent. This particular proposal has been extended to the forms of logophoricity that have been observed in some African languages (e.g., Ewe, as remarked in passing by Clements, 1975, and Amharic, as proposed by Schlenker, 2000).

There are modes of presentation of a person in thought corresponding to the first and third person pronouns. This paper proposes that there is also thought involving a second person mode of presentation of another, which might be expressed by an utterance involving ‘you’, but need not be expressed linguistically. It suggests that co-operative activity is the locus for such thought. First person thought is distinctive in how it supplies reasons for the subject to act. In co-operative action there (...) is first person plural intending and judging. So there is a way of thinking of another, when openly co-operating with him or her, which plays the distinctive role of giving reason for contribution to the co-operative activity. In slogan form, ‘you’ is ‘we minus I’. The way children learn to use second and third person pronouns is naturally explained on this view. Contrasting less sophisticated kinds of co-operative activity with more sophisticated forms, and considering some issues about common knowledge and commo.. (shrink)