The Clitic ‘lo’ in Italian, Propositional Attitudes and Presuppositions

Abstract

In this chapter I have used pronominal clitics in Italian in combination with verbs of propositional attitude to shed light on the opacity effects caused by intrusive pragmatics (at the level of free enrichments/explicatures). Certain problems, as discussed by Schiffer (Propositional attitudes in direct-reference semantics. In: Jaszczolt, Katarzyna (ed) The pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. Elsevier, Oxford, pp 14–30, 2000), completely disappear when the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of propositional clitics are discussed and such considerations are extended to propositional attitudes in general. In this chapter, I will add that a propositional clause must be in an appositional relationship (resulting from free enrichment and, thus, not actually present in the syntax) with the that-clause embedded in verbs of propositional attitude. I consider the consequences of this position. One of the most cogent results of this chapter is that pronominal clitics refer back to full propositions (if they refer to propositions at all) and not to minimal propositions. I take my own considerations on clitics to give support to the interesting and important considerations on emergent presuppositions by Kecskes and Zhang (Pragmat Cogn 17/2:331–355, 2009).