Perspective and the Self in Natural Language

This book investigates the encoding of perspective in natural language, by looking specifically at the class of attitude report known as de se reports. In a de se report, the attitude holder entertains a thought about herself from a first personal perspective. For example, in a typical context 'Ali believes that she wrote an interesting article' reports that Ali has the thought, "I wrote an interesting article". Exactly how this perspective on the self is integrated into the truth conditions of de se reports is a matter of long-standing debate. This book approaches this question in two parts. First, it argues that de se construal is mediated by a dedicated grammatical mechanism established at LF, known as de se binding. Evidence for this is drawn from a detailed study of counterfactual attitudes such as imagine, marshalling data from a variety of languages. The book then shows that the classical rendition of de se binding suffers from a number of problems. Hazel Pearson develops a new semantics for de se that maintains de se binding, but which overcomes the challenges faced by previous approaches. The resulting picture serves as an affirmation of de se exceptionalism: the view that there is something distinctive about attitudes about the self as a mental phenomenon, and that this distinctiveness is apparent in how such attitudes are encoded in the grammar.