Abstract
Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be ‘essentially indexical’ in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology of the grammatical phase. Our explanation is based on extending the ‘Topological Mapping Hypotheses’ of Longobardi (2005) and Sheehan and Hinzen (2011). The extended topology covers the full range of interpretations, from purely predicative to quantificational (scope-bearing), to referential and deictic. Along this scale, grammatical complexity increases, and none of these forms of reference is lexical. This provides evidence for the foundational conclusion that the source of essential indexicality is grammatical rather than lexical, semantic or pragmatic.
Highlights
A lexical item like ‘man’ cannot as such refer to this man or that, some men, men in general, the property of being a man, manhood, or mankind: phrases, in particular grammatical configurations, are required to achieve any of these effects
We argue that gender and person features are in complementary distribution. (ii) The [D + DEIX] configuration accounts for the intriguing morphological form of dative clitics in some Romance languages, like for instance the Catalan 3rd Person dative clitic ‘els hi’, with ‘hi’ a locative/deictic clitic
Notice that if this is on the right track, it is very close to the structure we have proposed for Dative clitics in the Romance descendants of Latin we have exemplified in (45) above, namely [ACC + DX]
Summary
A lexical item like ‘man’ cannot as such refer to this man or that, some men, men in general, the property of being a man, manhood, or mankind: phrases, in particular grammatical configurations, are required to achieve any of these effects. Longobardi argued that the grammar of proper names in their referential uses is systematically different from that of definite descriptions, in ways that Hinzen (2007:ch.5) argued explains the kind of ‘rigidity’ of reference (Kripke, 1980) found in proper names in these uses. We review this result in more detail below.
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