Friederike Moltmann
(IHPST, Paris)
"Presentational pronouns"
Friday, December 5 at 1:30pm
726 Broadway, room 703
Abstract:
In this talk I will take a closer look at the syntax and semantics of the pronouns 'this, 'that, and 'it' as their occur in (1a, b, c):
(1) a.This is Mary.
b. That is a wellknown person.
c. It was a student.
'This', 'that' and 'it' in (1) do not have a referential function, but rather occur in the subject position of specificational sentences, exhibiting the same constraints as subject wh clauses, as in (2):
(2) What I saw was a wellknown person.
The occurrences of the pronouns in (1) shed a significant light on the question whether specificational sentences express an identity of (possibly higher-order) meanings, question-answer relations, or function-value relations (with the subject acting as an intensional NP (Romero)). I show that specicational sentences with 'this', 'that' and 'it' in subject position support a question-answer analysis, but at the same time require signficant modications of existing accounts. I will also point out how a proper syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences as in (1) and (2) allows for a re-evaluation of certain philosophically significant sentences that appear to support a view of relative identity.