Context and Communication by Cappelen Herman; Dever Josh; & Josh Dever

Author:Cappelen, Herman; Dever, Josh; & Josh Dever
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

The third sentence of this narrative continues to report James’ thought, but does so without saying (for example) ‘James thought that’ or ‘James thought “…”’.

Free indirect discourse has interesting effects on context-sensitive language. Some context-sensitive language gets interpreted from the point of view of the reported agent. In the above example, ‘tomorrow’ picks out the day after James’ exhausted collapse, not the day after the narration. And ‘here’ picks out James’ location, not the narrator’s location. But other context-sensitive language gets interpreted from the narrator’s context. James’ thought is reported in free indirect discourse with third-person pronouns, not first-person—if the narrator had said, ‘I wasn’t going to meet him here’, he would inevitably be reporting about himself, not about James. Free indirect discourse is thus monstrous with respect to some context-sensitive language (tomorrow, here), and not with respect to other context-sensitive language (I, you).

4. Pronouns are context-sensitive expressions. But their interpretation can be shifted away from the context of utterance by being bound by quantifiers. This is obvious and uncontroversial for third-person pronouns. ‘She is a philosopher’, as uttered in context C, says that some woman prominent in C is a philosopher. But ‘Every woman at the conference said that she was a philosopher’, uttered in the same context, does not use ‘she’ to talk about the woman prominent in C, but rather to talk about all of the women at the conference.

In more unusual cases, we can get similar behavior from first and second-person pronouns. Consider examples such as: • Every time I meet a philosopher, we start arguing about free will. (‘We’ picks out the speaker together with varying philosophers, rather than the speaker and the audience of the context.)

• Every time I teach this course, more of you get in trouble for plagiarizing your papers. (‘You’ picks out the varying students in the teachings of the course, not just the audience of the context.)

• (Spoken by the Pope) I’m usually Italian. (‘I’ picks out the many popes, not just the current speaker.)In these cases, the phrases ‘every time’ and ‘usually’ are acting monstrously, causing the pronouns to get interpreted in a shifted context. Kaplan himself gives a similar example in a footnote as he discusses his ‘no monsters’ view:

• Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

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