Préparée à Ecole Normale Supérieure Meaning in Context Soutenue par Amir ANVARI Composition du jury : Le 06/06/1987 Emmanuel, CHEMLA M., Ecole Normale Supérieure Examinateur Amy Rose, DEAL Ecole doctorale n° 158 Mme., University of California, Berkeley Rapporteur ED3C - 158 Cornelia, EBERT Mme., Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Rapporteur Danny, FOX M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology Examinateur Philippe, SCHLENKER Spécialité M., Ecole Normale Supérieure Directeur de thèse Sciences cognitives Benjamin, SPECTOR M., Ecole Normale Supérieure Co-Directeur de thèse RÉSUMÉ Cette thèse contient une série d'enquêtes sur trois manières de comprendre la notion de contexte en tant que facteur interagissant avec le système linguistique afin de permettre, faciliter et, de manière générale, enrichir la communication. Les notions pertinentes sont les suivantes: contexte, contexte, situation, énonciation et signaux contextuels. MOTS CLÉS indexicalité, sémantique formelle, gestes ABSTRACT This dissertation contains a series of investigations into three ways in which the notion of context can be understood as a factor interacting with the linguistic system in order to enable, facilitate, and generally enrich communication. The relevant notions are context- qua-common ground, context-qua-situation of utterance, and context-qua-paralinguistic signals. KEYWORDS indexicality, formal semantics, gestures Contents 1 Introduction3 I Part One: Context qua Common Ground6 2 Logical Integrity7 2.1 Introduction...............................7 2.2 Logical Integrity (first version)..................... 10 2.3 Maximize Presupposition! and related phenomena........... 16 2.4 Mandatory implicatures......................... 26 2.5 Logical Integrity (final version)..................... 34 2.6 Loose ends and open problems..................... 37 2.7 Conclusion................................ 39 Appendices 40 .1 Percus cases and Presupposed Ignorance ................. 41 .2 On why Presupposed Ignorance and Magri’s system cannot be innocently combined................................. 51 .3 Some provisional remarks about too ................... 56 3 A Problem for Maximize Presupposition! (locally) 60 4 The Problem of Reflexive Belief in Spanish (with Mora Maldonado and Andrés Soria) 62 4.1 Introduction............................... 62 4.2 Why not Maximize Presupposition! ................... 64 4.3 The Contrafactivity Hypothesis..................... 70 4.4 The Enriched Excluded Middle Hypothesis............... 74 4.5 Some Further Empirical Observations.................. 75 4.6 Conclusions............................... 79 II Part Two: Context qua Situation of Utterance 80 5 The Ban Against Illeism and Indexical Shift in Farsi 81 5.1 Introduction............................... 81 5.2 Farsi and indexical shift......................... 88 5.3 The operator-based account of indexical shift.............. 92 5.4 Indexical shift bleeds the Ban Against Illeism.............. 94 1 Meaning in Context 5.5 Indexical shift and question-embedding: a case study......... 96 5.6 Indexical shift feeds the Ban Against Illeism.............. 98 5.7 Comparing the operator-based theory to the binding-based theory.. 103 5.8 Generalizing across sortal domains................... 107 5.9 Conclusion................................ 109 Appendices 111 .1 Exceptions to the Ban Against Illeism.................. 112 6 Copy Theory of Movement and Indexical Shift in Farsi 114 6.1 Introduction............................... 114 6.2 Farsi and indexical shift......................... 120 6.3 Two problems with copy theory and the operator-based approach... 124 6.4 The operator-based approach, deletion and indexical pronouns as re- stricted variables............................. 127 6.5 Copy theory and the variable-based account of indexical shifting... 134 6.6 Conclusion................................ 140 III Part Three: Context qua Paralinguistic Signals 141 7 On Co-nominal Pointing 142 7.1 Introduction............................... 142 7.2 The exemplification hypothesis..................... 147 7.3 The problem with every and no ..................... 151 7.4 A projection recipe for the exemplification hypothesis......... 152 7.5 Another look at every and no ...................... 154 7.6 Co-nominal pointing gestures and co-predicative iconic gestures... 155 7.7 Conclusion................................ 159 8 Dislocated Cosuppositions 162 8.1 Introduction............................... 162 8.2 The cosuppositional analysis....................... 163 8.3 The supervaluationist analysis...................... 165 8.4 Dislocated Cosuppositions........................ 167 8.5 Conclusion................................ 170 2 Chapter 1 Introduction This dissertation contains a series of investigations into three ways in which the no- tion of context can be understood as a factor interacting with the linguistic system in order to enable, facilitate, and generally enrich communication. Correspondingly, the dissertation is organized in three parts. In this introduction, I will summarize and outline the rest of this dissertation. The relevant notions are context qua com- mon ground (PartI), context qua situation of utterance (Part II), and context qua paralinguistic signals (Part III). Thinking of context as the set of background assumptions (or, common ground, Stalnaker 1978, Lewis 1979b), in Chapter2, I argue for a principle called Logical In- tegrity, which uniformly accounts for three classes of examples that have received dis- tinct theoretical treatments in the literature; namely, Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991a and subsequent literature), Presupposed Ignorance (Spector & Sudo 2017b), and mismatching implicatures (Magri 2009b and subsequent literature). According to Logical Integrity a sentence is infelicitous if it has a logically non-weaker alternative that it contextually entails.¹ In a short squib in Chapter3, an empirical problem is pointed out which, as far as I know, is problematic for every extant theory of the relevant paradigm.² Finally, in another paper (co-authored with Mora Maldonado and Andrés Soria) the case of ‘reflexive belief’ in Spanish is investigated in detail. This construction, built by adjoining the reflexive pronoun se to the predicate creer (to believe), displays a puzzling presuppositional behavior. When unembedded, creerse triggers the inference that its complement clause is false. When embedded under negation, it triggers the inference that its complement clause is true. We first argue that the negative inference in the unembedded case is not due to the Maximize Presupposition! principle (or any other related mechanism, including Logical Integrity), carving out the empirical profile of creerse along the way. We then explore two alternative explanations. The first is that creerse presupposes the falsity of its complement, i.e., that creerse is anti- factive. The second is that creerse presupposes that the attitude holder is wrongly opinionated with respect to the embedded proposition. We argue that the first analysis fails unless it is supplemented with the syntactic account of neg-raising, whereas the second analysis faces empirical challenges.³ ¹A shorter version of this paper has appeared in the proceedings of the 28th Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference. This, longer version has been accepted with major revisions by the journal, Natural Language Semantics. ²This squib has appeared in the 33rd issue of Snippets. ³This paper has appeared in the proceedings of the 23rd Sinn und Bedeutung Conference. I am 3 Meaning in Context Thinking of context as the situation of utterance, encoding information about, e.g., the speaker, the time and location of utterance (Kaplan 1977, Lewis 1980), it is an interesting finding that in some languages there are constructions in which more than one context of utterance is relevant for interpretation, a phenomenon known as “indexical shift” (see Deal 2017 for a recent survey). In a language that allows indexical shift, direct discourse can be reported in indirect discourse using the same indexical expressions that were used in the original utterance. For example, in English, which does not allow indexical shift, if John asserts, “I am hungry”, his utterance must be reported as John said he was hungry, where the indexical first person pronoun is replaced with a third person pronoun referring to John (I abstract away from tense). In Farsi, which does allow indexical shift, on the other hand, John’s assertion can be reported using either a sentence that corresponds to John said he is hungry (like English) or a sentence that correspond to John said I am hungry (unlike English). Stated differently, the first person pronoun in Farsi can be interpreted either with respect to the actual situation of utterance or with respect to the reported situation of utterance. PartII is dedicated to this phenomenon. In a sequence of two papers, I build on data from Farsi to explore how indexical shift interacts with illeism (i.e., referring to the speaker or the addressee with a third person noun phrase), on the one hand, and movement, on the other. Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person, is generally infelicitous, a generalisation which I label the Ban Against Illeism (BAI). In Chapter5, I provide evidence that, in Farsi, indexical shift both ‘bleeds’ and ‘feeds’ BAI. The former is the case because in an environment in which indexical shift is obligatory, third-person reference to the actual speaker is acceptable. Stated differently, one can construct