Alonso-Ovalle (2000, 2002)

Alonso-Ovalle (2000, 2002) proposes a unified account which aims to capture the im-personal and the referential uses of the Spanish null pronoun, pro2, that triggers second person singular agreement on the verb.^35,36 The central idea of both proposals is that pro2 expresses “non-rigid indexicality”, which is modelled by letting pro2 introduce a context-dependent functional variable. The two proposals, however, differ with respect to the type of functional variable contributed by pro2.

Alonso-Ovalle (2000) analyzes pro2 as a free variable ranging over a specific set of individual concepts; hence, the proposal can in principle be classified as a “definite account”. Consider (64).

(64) Jpro2K

g,s=g(f)(s)

where f is a free variable ranging over {f⁰ ∈Dhs,ei :∀s[f⁰(s)6= speaker(s₀)]}

(adapted slightly from Alonso-Ovalle 2000:12)

The value assigned to the functional variable by the variable assignmentg is determined via contextual salience, i.e. salience in the utterance situation s₀. Note that s₀ plays the same role as the Kaplanian context parameter and the world parameter of the interpretation function.³⁷

35The numeral inpro2 denotes the agreement triggered by the silent pronoun.

36Alonso-Ovalle also contrastspro2 with its overt counterpart, the second person singular pronoun t´u, which has only a referential use. Since Spanish is a pro-drop language, this contrast between pro2 andt´u is expected. As discussed in Chapter 1,Gruber (2011) observes that impersonal uses of personal pronouns in languages with pronominal forms of varying morphophonological strength, are typically only available for the morphologically weakest variant.

37Alonso-Ovalle(2000,2002) works in situation semantics as proposed inKratzer(1989).

Given the proposal in (64), the referential and impersonal uses of pro2 arise as follows. In the referential use,pro2 is interpreted with respect to the utterance situation s₀. In this case, the variable assignmentgpicks out the “addressee”-concept because it is the most salient concept in the utterance situation. Since impersonally usedpro2 only occurs in generic sentences, the value of f is determined relative to the most normal situations quantified over by the generic operator, and for most normal situations, Alonso-Ovalle argues, concepts other than the “addressee”-concept are higher in the salience ranking. Hence, other individuals are considered.³⁸ Example (65) illustrates the formalization for generic sentences containing impersonally usedpro2.

(65) a. En In

ese that

departamento department

trabajas work.2s

como like

un a

esclavo.

slave

b. Gen(in-that-department(s) & proto(s))(work-like-a-slave(pro2)(s)) (Alonso-Ovalle 2000:13)

Note that the predicate proto in (65-b) is true for a situation iff it is most normal or prototypical situation with respect to the other material in the restrictor ofGen.

Since Alonso-Ovalle treats the generic operator as an adverb of quantification, pro2 returns one unique individual per situation. Hence as in Malamud’s proposal discussed in Section2.3.2, the perceived quasi-universal quantification over individuals is modeled by universal quantification over situations, specifically most normal situations that contain possibly different unique individuals.

There are two immediate problems with this proposal. The first problem arises because the Kaplanian context parameter and the world parameter are subsumed under one situation parameter. Sincepro2 does not rigidly depend on the utterance situation s₀, the formalization in (64) cannot capture the referential use of pro2 in embedded clauses. Whenever the situation parameter is bound by a higher operator, situations other thans₀ are considered, for which the “addressee”-concept may return individuals other than the addressee in s0. As a consequence, referential interpretations of pro2 should not be possible in non-episodic sentences, at all. The second problem is that the value of the functional variable f is fixed once it is assigned contextually. For the impersonal use, it can therefore not be ensured that f returns an individual for every situation that is quantified over generically, unless the concept refers to the situation, e.g. “the typical individual in this situation”. It seems unclear to me whether concepts of this kind are particularly salient with respect to most normal situations.

In contrast to the proposal in Alonso-Ovalle (2000), Alonso-Ovalle (2002) proposes that pro2 contributes functions from sets of individuals to individuals, reminiscent of

38Alonso-Ovalle (2000) does not explicitly work out how the contextual salience ranking is deter-mined for his account.

choice functions; hence this proposal can be classified as an “indefinite account”. The idea of “non-rigid indexicality” is, however, retained from his previous account.

With respect to the overall formal framework, Alonso-Ovalle assumes that the in-terpretation function takes two situation parameters, a reference situation s/r and an index s.³⁹ In episodic sentences, s/r is the situation of utterance s₀; in generic sen-tences, s/r varies with respect to the most normal situations quantified over by the generic operator.

The central idea behind the second account is that pro2 contributes a context dependent functional variable F. The possible values of F are functions from sets of individuals to individuals assigned to F by the variable assignment g. Further-more, a partial function R from situations to sets of individuals is introduced that retrieves all individuals in a given situation. For the utterance situation, it is stipu-lated that R always returns the set that contains only the speaker and the addressee, i.e. R(s₀) ={speaker(s₀),addressee(s₀)}.⁴⁰ Example (66) gives the final formalization of pro2 proposed in Alonso-Ovalle (2002).

(66) Jpro2K

s/r,s,g = [g(F)](R(s/r)− {speaker(s/r)})

where F ranges over the set of functions of the formf :℘(De)→De

(adapted with minor changes from Alonso-Ovalle 2002:6)

The silent pronoun pro2 contributes a function that takes a set of individuals in the reference situation that explicitly excludes the speaker as its argument, and returns some individual. Unfortunately, Alonso-Ovalle is not explicit about the possible values for F. Based on his discussion of the referential and impersonal uses ofpro2, I suspect that the contextually assigned value for F is a function that returns a member of its input set—similar to traditional choice functions. Without a restriction on the values of F along these lines, a constant function f : D_he,ti → D_e could be assigned to F that always returns the speaker of s/r even though the speaker of s/r was explicitly excluded from the input set.

If a restriction to choice functions is adopted for F, the meaning of pro2 can be characterized as follows. If the situation of utterance s₀ is picked as the reference situation, i.e. in episodic sentences, R(s₀) − {speaker(s₀)} = {addressee(s₀)}, and since {addressee(s₀)}is a singleton set, Fnecessarily returns the single member of this set: the addressee in s₀. Hence, in episodic statements, the referent of pro2 comes out as the addressee of the utterance. In non-episodic sentences, the generic operator quantifies over relevantly prototypical situations, which are also the arguments of R and speaker(.). Since for every prototypical situation, a different set of individuals is

39The term “index” is used in the sense of Lewis(1986), cf. Chapter3.

40Alonso-Ovalle definesR(s0) as the set{cS, cA}, i.e. the set containing the Kaplanian speaker and addressee. Since he does not use an explicit context parameter c, I adapted his definitions so that they consistently use situations.

determined as the argument forF, Freturns a different individual in each prototypical situation.

The account again suffers from various problems. One general problem shared by the previous account is that in non-episodic sentences, a referential use ofpro2 should not be available, at all. This is again a consequence of Alonso-Ovalle’s assumptions re-garding the meaning of the generic operator and the resulting variation across reference situations. Furthermore, since the proposal in (66) requires that the speaker of any given reference situation is excluded from the set of individuals returned byR, it has to be implicitly assumed that for each arbitrary situation a speaker can be determined.

It is, however, unclear to me how this can be ensured.