1.5 The semantics of personal pronouns
1.5.1 Introductory remarks
In Section 1.2, it was shown that in their impersonal uses, German first and second person singular ich and du differ in their semantic behavior fundamentally from when they are used referentially. Specifically, the impersonal and referential uses differ from each other in three respects: in their impersonal readings, but not in their referential readings . . .
• ich and du do not shift in indirect discourse.
• ich and du can be used interchangably, and pronominal forms may be mixed.
• ich and du show quantificational variability effects.
Having worked out these differences, it is instructive to consider how the semantic contribution of the referential uses are standardly analyzed, and to see which aspects of these analyses capture the noted behavior of the referential uses. Hence, this sec-tion’s aim is to provide the necessary background on the grammatical properties of referentially used singular personal pronouns, and to introduce the classical and re-cent influential analyses of their semantic contribution (Kaplan 1978 [1989],Heim and Kratzer 1998, andKratzer 2009). The final point I address is that the popular propos-als that are currently available to account for the refential uses ofich anddu cannot be adopted straightforwardly to capture the semantic behavior of their impersonal uses, as suggested by their different semantic behavior.
1.5.2 1st/2nd vs. 3rd – syntactic and semantic properties
In traditional normative and descriptive grammars, pronouns in general and personal pronouns in particular are characterized as proforms which “stand in” for full nominal expressions, i.e. full or bare noun phrases.70
The morphological paradigm of personal pronouns is traditionally structured with respect to the conceptually motivated grammatical categories of person, number, and
70Traditional grammars usually also distinguish personal pronouns from reflexive pronouns and possessive pronouns. I group these two classes with the class of personal pronouns.
gender. For German and English, the category of person is divided into first, second, and third person. First and second person encode the two participant roles—speaker and addressee—in contrast to non-participants, which are encoded by third person.
The category of number is divided into singular and plural, which encode single and multiple referents across the category of person. The third category, gender, is only distinguished in the third person singular, and is divided into the three subcategories masculine, feminine, and neuter. Table 1.1 illustrates the pronominal paradigms of German and English personal pronouns in nominative case.71
singular plural
first I we
second you
third he, she, it they
singular plural
first ich wir
second du ihr
third er, sie, es sie
Table 1.1: The systems of English and German personal pronouns in nominative case Since the central topic of this thesis is the impersonal use of first and second per-son singular pronouns, I restrict the following general overview to singular perper-sonal pronouns only. A discussion of the additional syntactic and semantic idiosyncracies of plural personal pronouns is beyond the scope of this thesis, but see e.g. Sauerland (2008) and Rullmann (2010) for details.
The traditional way of presenting the paradigm of personal pronouns—indeed the formation of a class of personal pronouns as such—already suggests that pronouns of all persons and numbers are a uniform lexical class. Benveniste (1971[1958]) is one of the first to criticize this view on personal pronouns. He argues that first and second person pronouns need to be distinguished from third person pronouns based on two fundamental semantic differences. First, the reference of first and second person pronouns is strictly dependent on the utterance context. The reference of third person pronouns, on the other hand, is not fixed automatically from the utterance context, see (111).
(111) a. A to B: I like sushi. A likes sushi.
b. A to B: You like sushi. B likes sushi.
c. A to B: He/she likes sushi.
X (whoever A intends to refer to) likes sushi.
In other words, the speaker can more or less freely choose the intended referent for third person singular pronouns from the context (as long as it can be made clear who he refers to). The speaker- and addressee-reference found with first and second person
71English personal pronouns are the only elements in the language which still distinguish between nominative and accusative case. In German, the full case paradigms observable for nouns also exist for pronouns.
pronouns, on the other hand, depends entirely on the circumstances of utterance, and cannot be influenced by the speaker’s intentions.
The second semantic difference is that only third person pronouns are “true proforms”
which can stand in and pick up the referent of any preceding (or following) nominal expression. First and second person pronouns cannot be used in this way. Compare examples(112) and (113).72
(112) a. Peter1 likes his1 mother.
b. *Peter1 likes my1/your1 mother.
(113) a. Peter1 likes sushi. He1 also likes sake.
b. *Peter1 likes sushi. I1/you1 also like sake.
Further differences arise when the behavior of first, second, and third person singular pronouns with respect to syntactic and semantic binding is considered—one of the central topics in the modern syntactic and semantic literature.73 There, four uses of personal pronouns are generally distinguished (cf. Evans 1977, 1980; Elbourne 2008):
the referential use, the co-referential use, the bound use, and the so-called E-type use.74 In the referential use, a personal pronoun is used to make reference to an entity that is present or somehow salient in the context of utterance. The intended referent can be, but does not have to be made explicit with a pointing gesture (“ostension”), consider (114)in the given context.
(114) Said of a man passing in the street: He’s up early.
(Evans 1980:337)
A co-referentially used personal pronoun shares its reference with a referential ex-pression or pronoun occurring in the same sentence or previous discourse, which is called its antecedent. For instance, in (115) the noun phrase Peter is the antecedent for both occurrences of the pronoun he in (115-b) and (115-c), and in (116) John is the antecedent of the possessivehis.
72I use indices such as natural numbers or the lettersi,j,kto indicate shared reference, and later on to indiscriminately mark co-reference, binding, as well as E-type configurations. In case a referential expression carries the same index as a personal pronoun, the two expressions are intended to co-refer.
Whenever a quantifying expression and a personal pronoun carry the same index, the quantifying expression is assumed to bind or stand in an E-type configuration to the pronoun.
73This section only provides a brief overview of the semantic proposals for singular personal pro-nouns. I do not discuss the literature on Binding Theory and the characteristics of personal pronouns connected to the syntax-semantics interface. For an overview seeB¨uring(2005,2011) and Elbourne (2008).
74Traditional grammar distinguishes two uses of personal pronouns: a deictic and an anaphoric use.
The deictic use corresponds to the referential use in the four-way distinction, and the anaphoric use covers the three other uses.
(115) a. A: Peter1 is nice.
b. B: Yes, he1 likes sushi.
c. A: And he1 likes sake.
(116) John1 loves his1 mother.75 (Evans 1980:337)
In the bound use, the pronominal referent obligatorily depends on the reference of another linguistic expression, or covaries with a quantifying expression. Reflexive pro-nouns, for example, only have a bound use, see (117) and (118).
(117) a. Few congressmen1 admire only the people they1 know.
(Evans 1980:339)
b. Few congressmen1 admire only themselves1. (118) a. He1/the man1 likes himself1.
b. She1/the woman1 likes herself1. c. It1/the dog1 likes itself1.
A prerequisite for the bound use to arise is that the binding expression precedes the bound pronoun, and stands in a c-command relation76 to it.
As for the bound use, the E-type use of a pronoun involves covariation of the pro-noun’s referent with a quantifying expression, as well.77 The special characteristic of the E-type use, however, is that the seemingly bound use of the pronoun arises even though the quantifying expression and the pronoun do not stand in the required
75Note that there is evidence from so called strict and sloppy readings of verb phrase ellipsis that the possessive pronoun in this example is ambiguous between a co-referential and a bound use. As Williams(1977) and others show, ellipsis requires parallelism at the level of Logical Form between the elided verb phrase and its antecedent verb phrase. Therefore, if the elided material is ambiguous the parallelism requirement demands that the antecedent verb phrase be ambiguous, as well. For instance, inJohn1loves his1 mother, and Peter2 does too, the elided verb phrase may have two interpretations.
The possessive in the elided verb phrase, loves his mother, can be interpreted either as referring to John, or as referring to Peter. In the first case, the possessive co-refers with the subject of the first clause. Therefore, also the possessive in the first clause needs to have a co-referential reading. In the second case, the possessive is bound by the subject of the second clause, i.e. Peter. Hence, the possessive in the first clause also has to be bound by its antecedent.
76C-command is a structural relation between two nodes in a tree structure.
(i) In a tree structure, a nodeαc-commands a nodeβ iff neither node dominates the other and the node immediately dominatingαdominatesβ.
77Originally, E-type uses were called “donkey pronouns”. This term was coined by Geach (1962) who discusses sentences like (i-a). His example is usually considered together with the conditional version in(i-b).
(i) a. Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
b. If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.
Kamp (1981) and Heim (1988 [1982]) treat donkey pronouns as bound by a quantifier scoping at sentence level. Later on, donkey pronouns were re-analyzed, and renamed “E-type uses” of these pronouns (cf.Heim 1990).
syntactic configuration. That is, the quantifying expression does not c-command the pronoun. Consider the examples in(119).
(119) a. Every congressman who admires a politician1 votes for him1. b. If a congressman2 admires a politician1, he2 votes for him1. c. Few congressmen1 admire Kennedy, and they1 are very junior.
(Evans 1980:339)
As (119-c) shows, E-type pronouns also do not get the same interpretation as true bound variables. Their reference depends on the set of individuals quantified over, but not on the quantificational force of the quantifying expression. Ifthey in(119-c) were logically bound by the quantifying expressions few congressmen, the pronoun would be expected to be in the scope of the quantifier. If this were the case, the sentence would be expected to have the following interpretation: ‘Few congressmen are such that they admire Kennedy and are very junior’. This interpretation is not available for the example above. Consequently, the semantic relation between the pronoun and the quantifying expression in the E-type use is not the same as in the true bound use of personal pronouns.
When the syntactic and semantic behavior of first and second person pronouns is considered with respect to the last three uses, it is immediately clear that Benveniste’s distinction between first and second person pronouns, on the one hand, and third person pronouns, on the other hand, is reflected here, as well.78
Since first and second person pronouns cannot pick up the reference of referring ex-pressions, it is unclear whether they have a co-referential use in the same sense as third person pronouns. Furthermore with respect to previous occurrences of first and second person pronouns, putative co-referentially used pronouns cannot be distinguished from further referential uses of these pronouns, see (120).
(120) a. A: I like my mother.
b. A: I like sushi, and I also like sake.
The reference ofI andmy in(120-a)may be determined independently of the presence of an antecedent, sinceI andmy always refer to the speaker of the utterance. The same is true for the two occurrences of I in (120-b). Therefore, no evidence for a genuine co-referential use is available. The referential use and the co-referential use basically coincide.
First and second person singular reflexives can only be bound by first and second person pronouns, respectively, see(121).
78Crosslinguistically, first and second person pronouns are also distinguished from third person pronouns by various morphosyntactic phenomena. Cf.Gruber(2011:336) for a non-exhaustive list.
(121) a. I1/*you1/*he1/*the man1 like(s) myself1. b. *I1/you1/*he1/*the man1 like(s) yourself1.
Also quantifying noun phrases are unable to bind first and second person singular pronouns, see (122).
(122) a. *Every man1 likes my1/your1 mother.
b. *Every man1 likes myself1/yourself1.
It seems that, in general, non-reflexive first and second person pronouns cannot be bound. However in some rare cases exemplified below, bound readings of these pro-nouns do in fact occur (cf. Rullmann 2004;Heim 2005;Kratzer 2009).
(123) a. I’m the only one around here who can take care of my children.
(Kratzer 2009:188)
b. Only you eat what you cook.
(Kratzer 2009:188)
The preferred interpretation of the first sentence is that the speaker is the only person who can take care of his or her children, and that all others are incapable of taking care of their own children. Similarily, the second sentence is usually understood as saying that the addressee is the only person who eats what he or she cooks, and that no one else eats what they, themselves, cook. For these interpretations to be available, my and you need to be bound by only.
The sentences in (123) also have dispreferred interpretations, which arise when the possessive forms are interpreted as strictly referential. For the first sentence, the dis-preferred reading is that the speaker is the only person who can take care of his or her children, and that all others are incapable of taking care of the speaker’s children, and for the second example, that the addressee is the only person who eats what he or she cooks, and that no one else eats what the addressee cooks.
First and second person pronouns in their bound use are called “fake indexicals”
in the literature. This reflects the fact that regardless of their being morphologically marked as first and second person pronouns, they behave exactly like bound third person pronouns.
An analogous E-type use is unavailable for first and second person singular pronouns, see (124).
(124) a. *If a speaker1 says a sentence, I1 usually mean it.
b. *Every speaker who offends an addressee1 will apologize to you1 later.
The ungrammaticality of(124)is, of course, connected to Benveniste’s observation that
I andyou cannot be anaphoric to other referential expressions even if these expressions may denote the same individuals.
This discussion results in the following picture.
referential co-referential bound E-type
1st yes yes (restricted) no
2nd yes yes (restricted) no
3rd yes yes yes yes
Table 1.2: Availability of the four uses of personal pronouns
So in sum, even though personal pronouns are traditionally seen as a uniform lex-ical class, their syntactic/semantic behavior is not uniform. Speciflex-ically, the above discussion suggests that first and second person singular pronouns, on the one hand, and third person singular pronouns, on the other hand, should be analyzed as distinct classes.
1.5.3 “Standard” accounts of pronominal semantics
One formal analysis of personal pronouns which captures the referential, the co-referential, and the bound use, is proposed in Heim and Kratzer (1998). They introduce a spe-cific interpretational rule for pronouns, which introduces an individual variable as the denotation of a pronominal expression, see(125).79
(125) Pronouns and traces rule:
Ifα is a pronoun or trace,iis an index, and g is a variable assignment whose domain includes i, thenJαiK
g =g(i) (Heim and Kratzer 1998:241)
This account is based on the traditional analysis of third person singular pronouns as individual variables, which can already be found in Montague (1973) and Kamp and Reyle(1993).
The variable contributed by a pronoun or trace is assigned its value by a variable assignment g : N → De, i.e. a function from natural numbers (i.e. indices) to indi-viduals. That is, the variable assignment models the determination of the pronominal referent from discourse referents that were previously (contextually or linguistically) introduced.
In the referential and co-referential use, the pronominal referent depends on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context. Formally, it is assumed that if a variable assign-ment reflects an appropriate context for a sentence containing referential pronouns,
79Heim and Kratzer analyze traces as obligatorily bound variables. Consequently, pronouns and traces are covered by the same interpretational rule. Cf.Heim and Kratzer(1998:241).
it contains the right index-individual pairs to assign the intended individuals to the variables contributed by the pronouns.
In the bound uses, on the other hand, the referent of the pronoun covaries with the individuals that the binding expression ranges over. To capture this behavior formally, the variable assignment is manipulated by the particular rule of interpretation in(126) to yield a co-varying interpretation.
(126) Predicate abstraction:
If α is a branching node with daughters β and γ, where β dominates only a numerical index i. Then, for any variable assignment g, JαK
g = λx ∈ D. JγK
gx/i
(Heim and Kratzer 1998:186)
Person, gender, and number information for third person singular pronouns is con-tributed by morphosyntactic features, which are interpreted as partial identity func-tions that place presupposifunc-tions on the referent determined via the variable assignment.
For example, third person singular feminineshe is built up from the following structure.
(127) DP
[third person] DP
[feminine] DP
[singular] DP she1 (Heim and Kratzer 1998:244)
The presupposition introduced by the gender feature [feminine] filters out all non-female individuals.80
(128) J[feminine]K
g =λx:xis female. x (Heim and Kratzer 1998:244)
80Presuppositions are expressed in Heim and Kratzer (1998) as domain restrictions on the λ-expression. The general form of aλ-term is as in(i).
(i) λx:φ. ψ
φdenotes a condition on the domain ofx, whileψdenotes the value that the function assigns tox. A mathematical example is λx:x∈N. x+ 1, which denotes a function that is only defined for natural numbers (x∈N), and that returns the successor of that number.
When this analysis is applied to German and English third person singular pronouns, they come out as follows.
(129) a. Jer1/he1K
g =g(1), defined if g(1) is a single male individual b. Jsie1/she1K
g =g(1), defined ifg(1) is a single female individual c. Jes1/it1K
g =g(1), defined if g(1) is a single thing
Since this account can handle the (co-)referential and bound readings of third per-son singular pronouns, one could try to extend it to first and second perper-son singular pronouns. Such an analysis should also be able to capture the “fake indexical” cases.
To implement this idea, one has to introduce first and second person features that restrict the admissibile values of the variable to the speaker or the addressee in c, respectively, similar to the gender feature in (128), see (130).
(130) a. J[1st]K
g,c=λx:x is the speaker in c. x b. J[2nd]K
g,c=λx :xis the addressee in c. x
Given this additional assumption, the first and second person singular pronouns in German and English come out as follows.
(131) a. Jich1/I1K
g,c =g(1), defined if g(1) is a single individual and the speaker in c
b. Jdu1/you1K
g,c = g(1), defined if g(1) is a single individual and the ad-dressee in c
Kratzer (2009) shows that the extension of the formalization in Heim and Kratzer (1998) to first and second person pronouns fails to capture the “fake indexical” cases for first and second person singular pronouns. Since the potential values for the variables are restricted to the speaker or addressee, i.e. a specific individual in the context, the account cannot capture covariation. All non-speaker or non-addressee individuals would be filtered out by the presupposition of the first and second person feature, respectively.
The idea to interpret personal pronouns as individual variables also leads to problems for the E-type uses of third person singular pronouns. Following Cooper (1979) and Heim (1990), Heim and Kratzer (1998) therefore propose to interpret E-type uses as covert definite descriptions of the following form.
(132) DP
the NP
N R7
DP pro1 (Heim and Kratzer 1998:292)
The seemingly bound reading of the E-type uses arises because the pronouns are
The seemingly bound reading of the E-type uses arises because the pronouns are