| Description |
In this presentation, we show that syntax provides an interesting window on the semantics/pragmatics of the first person. Our initial source of inspiration is Frege’s concerns about the first-person (Frege 1918-1919), recently revived by Kripke as a criticism of the position according to which Kaplan’s two-dimensional semantics is all is needed for an adequate semantics of the first-person (Kaplan 1989, Kripke 2011). First, we will discuss a number of phenomena that show the pervasiveness and the complexity of first-personal interpretations: (i) the irreducibility of the first-person, in Perry’s sense (Perry 1979); (ii) the intricacies of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’, in main and embedded clauses (Wittgenstein 1958, Anscombe 1975); (iii) the insufficiencies of the pragmatic solution to Moore’s paradox (Rieger 2015, Delfitto & Fiorin 2020). Second, we will extend and re-examine the syntactic evidence for a cartographic layer in the clausal left periphery encoding the speaker’s coordinates (in Giorgi’s and Bianchi’s sense; Giorgi 2010, Bianchi 2006) as the presence of an experiential layer of meaning encoding the notion of self-ascription of propositional content, and, through the use of first- and second-person pronouns, constraining self-ascription to speakers or addressees (Wechsler 2010). The final result will consist in a substantial reshaping of the boundaries between the role of language structure and language use in deriving first-personal interpretations and in drawing some implications of the presence of a ‘subjective’ layer of meaning in the syntax for the ontology of natural language.
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