Motion Deixis, Indexicality, and Presupposition David Y. Oshima ...

Motion Deixis, Indexicality, and Presupposition
David Y. Oshima
This paper argues that deictic verbs GO/COME (English go/come and their counterparts in
other languages) are kinds of indexicals in the Kaplanian sense. In the first part, I
demonstrate and defend the view that deictic verbs refer to a contextually provided set of
individuals (rather than to a specific individual that serves as the “deictic center”; cf. Fillmore
1997; Talmy 2000) and argue that the pragmatic meanings associated with deictic verbs are
both presuppositional (in the standard sense) and indexical (in the sense that they make
reference to the context of utterance). In the second part, I address the “deictic perspective
shift” phenomenon in attitude reports (Kuno 1988, among others) and argue that GO/COME
in English, Japanese, etc., can be anchored either to the primary context (the context of the
external utterance) or to the secondary context (the context of the reported attitude).
Building on Oshima (2006), I adopt the view that GO/COME refer to a contextually
provided set of individuals, which is called RP (reference point(s)), and that GO requires that
no member of RP be at the goal while COME requires that some member thereof be at the
goal. The selection of members of RP is subject to person-based constraints; in English,
roughly, (i) the speaker is always a member, (ii) it is preferred (and sometimes almost
obligatory) for the addressee to be a member as well, and (iii) a third person entity can be
additionally included only if neither the speaker nor the addressee is the subject. This analysis
makes correct predictions where alternatives along the lines of Fillmore (1997) or Talmy
(2000) fail; it explains, for example, why go in (1) is less preferred and come in (2) is
unacceptable (note that, if either the speaker or the addressee can be the “deictic center”, it is
predicted that (1a,b) and (2a,b) would be all acceptable):
(1) Can I {a. go/b. come} visit you
(2) Will you {a. #go/b. come} visit me
The entailments associated with GO/COME satisfy the standard criteria for
presuppositions (e.g. survival under negation); also, RP can be treated as a component of the
context of utterance (i.e., a context consists of a tuple of agent, addressee, time, etc., and RP).
The semantic representations for GO/COME can be roughly given as in (4), with the
presupposition connective “< ; >”, which is a variant of Blamey’s (1986) “transplication” or
Blau’s (1985) “prejunction”:
(4) a. go |→ λpl 1 [λx []
b. come |→ λpl 1 [λx []
cf. I |→ Agent (c*), you |→ Addressee (c*) (cf. Schlenker 2003)
(n.b.) a. [[]] c,w,g
is true iff [[φ]] c,w,g is true (and is false otherwise);
is felicitous iff [[ψ]] c,w,g is true (and is infelicitous otherwise).
b. [[c*]] c,w,g is defined only if g(c*) = c (the context of utterance).
If defined, [[c*]] c,w,g = g(c*).
c. [[RP(c)]] c,w,g = the RP coordinate of [[c]] c,w,g
For example, “John comes to N.Y.” translates as:
(5)

GO/COME in English, Japanese, etc. can be interpreted not only w.r.t. the external context of
utterance, but also w.r.t. a secondary context introduced by an attitude predicate; come in (6b),
for example, can be understood as an instance of a secondary indexical (on a par with a
logophoric pronoun, etc.) (Schlenker 2003):
(6) (Situation: John and his addressee are in Chicago. Bob (believes that he)
{is/was} in N.Y.)
John : “Bob believes that I {a. went/b. came} to N.Y. last week”.
cf. #I came to N.Y. last week.
In an attitude report where the “deictic perspective” is anchored to the secondary agent, such
as (6b), the deictic (indexical) nature of the reported belief (or utterance, etc.) is maintained
(e.g. (6b) implies that Bob’s belief corresponds to: ‘John came to N.Y.’, rather than ‘John
went to N.Y.’), i.e., such a report is de se w.r.t. motion deixis. When the perspective is
anchored to the primary agent (e.g., (6a)), on the other hand, the deictic information in the
original belief is lost, yielding a report that is non-de se w.r.t. motion deixis.
The de se/non-de se opposition of an attitude report (w.r.t. motion deixis) has interesting
interactions with the presupposition projection pattern. That is, the presupposition triggered
by a deictic motion verb in the complement clause is inherited to the matrix level only if the
perspective is anchored to the external speaker: e.g., (6a) (roughly) presupposes that John or
his addressee actually is/was in N.Y., while (6b) only presupposes that Bob believes that he
is/was in New York (e.g., Bob believes that he has been in N.Y. for a month, and he also
believes that I came there too last week.). Using a multi-valued logic (where a sentence is
interpreted either as “true/felicitous”, “true/infelicitous”, “false/felicitous”, or
“false/infelicitous”), I develop a theory of ps projection where a ps may be filtered by an
attitude predicate (in accordance with observations/predictions by Heim (1992) and
Kartunnen (1974)), or may be inherited through it. Not only does this analysis make correct
predictions on data that involve deictic verbs, it also provides a solution to the more general
(and long-standing) problem for the theory of ps projection, which has been known as “de re
presuppositions” (e.g. “John believes that even Mary failed”, on one reading, presupposes
‘Mary was (actually) the least likely person to fail (while John may or may not believe that
Mary was unlikely to fail)’).
References
Blamey, S. 1986. Partial logic. In D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, eds, Handbook of
Philosophical Logic Vol III. Reidel.
Blau, U. 1985. Die Logik der Unbestimmheiten und Paradoxien (Kurzfassung). Erkenneus
22. (Ulrich; hoge 369-459)
Fillmore, C. 1997 (1975). Lectures on Deixis. CSLI.
Heim, I. 1992. Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs. Journal of
Semantics 9.
Karttunnen, L. 1974. Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics 1.
Kuno, S. 1988. Blended quasi-direct discourse in Japanese. In W. J. Poser (ed.), Papers from
the 2nd International Workshop on Japanese Syntax. CSLI.
Oshima, D. 2006. GO and COME revisited: What serves as a reference point. Berkeley
Linguistic Society 32.
Schlenker, P. 2003. A plea for monsters. Linguistics and Philosophy 26.
Talmy, L. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. MIT Press.