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Abstract
For many years, philosophers (most notably Hector-Neri Castañeda, Jakko Hintikka, John Perry and David Lewis) have analyzed propositions that express self-reference and self-attribution. Various explanations of the contrast between truth de re, de dicto and de se have been proposed. The issue took an interesting and novel turn when the syntax and semantics of de se expressions were examined. Gennaro Chierchia (1989), James Higginbotham (1991, 2010, 2013) and Norbert Hornstein (1999) have offered convincing explanations of the special properties of expressions of possible, impossible or mandatory self-reference. Interesting commonalities and differences between different languages are presently being explored.1 Interesting recent developments are logophoric pronouns and indexical shifting in several languages. These are briefly summarized at the end of this paper.2 1.1 Introduction 1.2 A clear case 1.3 A real life personal anecdote 1.4 Interesting questions 2.1 Some history 2.2 Castañeda’s solution 2.3 Enter John Perry 2.4 Enter David Lewis 3. Enter semantics and syntax 3.1 Higginbotham on Lewis 3.2 Something semantically special. De Re, De Dicto and De Se 4. Differences between languages 4.1 Kayne’s analysis of prepositional complementizers 4.2 Higginbotham 4.3 Other Italian De Se examples 4.4 Romanian De Se 4.5 Persian 4.6 Iraqi Arabic 11 I dedicate this paper to the dear memory of Jim Higginbotham, who first introduced me to the syntax and semantics of de se expressions. 2 I am grateful to Gennaro Chierchia, Noam Chomsky, Robert Henderson, Diego Gabriel Krivochen and Hazel Pearson for comments and suggestions on a previous draft. All remaining errors and unclarities are exclusively my fault. 21 4.7 Japanese 4.8 Mayan TABLE OF LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES 5. Lessons from all this 6. Logophoric pronouns 7 Indexical shifting Conclusion Biblio 1.1