A note on the gifted mathematician that you claim to be

Alexander Grosu*, Manfred Krifka

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The paper is a reply to Bassi and Rasin (2018) on the treatment of sentences like [The gifted mathematician that you claim to be] should have solved this task without problems by Grosu and Krifka (2007), which was published in Linguistics and Philosophy. Grosu and Krifka provide an analysis of the de dicto interpretation in which the bracketed expression refers to an individual concept. Bassi and Rasin question this because equivalent expressions in Hebrew, in which the gap is rendered by a resumptive pronoun, do not exhibit the de dicto interpretation, but only the de re interpretation. We provide independent evidence that person-marked pronouns in post-copular position are incompatible with antecedents that denote individual concepts, thus explaining Bassi and Rasin’s observation within Grosu and Krifka’s framework. We furthermore point out two new problems for the analysis of Bassi and Rasin presented in the body of their article, which does not make use of individual concepts or of some alternative mechanism that can deal with substitutivity in opaque contexts. We also note that an alternative analysis they present in an appendix amounts to a notational variant of ours.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1227-1233
Number of pages7
JournalLinguistics and Philosophy
Volume45
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2022

Keywords

  • De dicto interpretations
  • Individual concepts
  • Relative clauses
  • Resumptive pronouns
  • Syntax-semantics interface

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