Gender in conditionals
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Gender in conditionals Fabio Del Prete1 · Sandro Zucchi2 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The 3sg pronouns “he” and “she” impose descriptive gender conditions (being male/female) on their referents. These conditions are standardly analysed as presuppositions (Cooper in Quantification and syntactic theory, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983; Heim and Kratzer in Semantics in generative grammar, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998). Cooper argues that, when 3sg pronouns occur free, they have indexical presuppositions: the gender condition must be satisfied by the pronoun’s referent in the actual world. In this paper, we consider the behaviour of free 3sg pronouns in conditionals and focus on cases in which the pronouns’ gender presuppositions no longer seem to be indexical and project locally instead. We compare these cases to previously reported shifty readings of indexicals in so-called “epistemic conditionals” (Santorio in Philos Rev 121(3):359–406, 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters. Keywords Conditionals · Pronouns · Gender presuppositions · Context · Indexicals · Monsters
For feedback on previous versions of this paper, we thank the audience of the Fourth Philosophy of Language and Mind Conference (held at Ruhr University, Bochum) and the audience of the departmental seminars of the Philosophy Department of the University of Sheffield. We also thank Heather Burnett, Francis Cornish, and Jesse Tseng for discussion of the data. Finally, we thank two anonymous referees and associate editor Paolo Santorio for helping us to improve the paper.
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Sandro Zucchi [email protected] Fabio Del Prete [email protected]
1
CLLE-ERSS UMR 5263, CNRS et Université de Toulouse II, Maison de la Recherche, Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, 5, allées Antonio Machado, 31058 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
2
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Piero Martinetti, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122 Milan, Italy
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F. Del Prete, S. Zucchi
1 Indexical gender presuppositions Free third person singular (3sg) pronouns have been reported to have indexical gender presuppositions. More precisely, Cooper (1983) claims that IGP.
free (non-anaphoric) 3sg pronouns presuppose that their descriptive genderspecific content (human male/female) is satisfied by their referents in the actual world.
For example, one cannot utter (1) felicitously to say of an individual who is known to be a woman that there is a possibility that she is male and American: (1) ??It could be that he is American (pointing at Scarlett). Analogously, one cannot utter (2) felicitously in a context in which the conversational participants know that Scarlett is a woman and Jones mistakenly believes that she is a man: (2) ??Jones believes that he (pointing at Scarlett) is a university professor. Pronouns anaphoric to proper names also display indexical presuppositions. For example, (3) is infelicitous, where “hej ” is anap
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