Shifty attitudes: indexical shift vs. perspectival anaphora
Sandhya Sundaresan
August 2020 

In cases of indexical-shift, so-called indexical pronouns like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ refer to the Speaker, Addressee, Location, and Time of some other context than the utterance-context. In cases of perspectival anaphora, an anaphor tracks the perspective of some other individual than the utterance Speaker (or Addressee). Thus, both phenomena involve referential obviation of a pronoun or anaphor from the utterance- context. Such obviation also occurs under highly similar grammatical conditions, e.g. in the scope of an attitude predicate (e.g. ‘say’, ‘think’, ‘perceive’). Here, I introduce the core properties of both phenomena and show that they actually stand in a subset- superset relation. The availability of indexical-shift in a given environment entails that of perspectival anaphora, but not vice-versa. I describe a plausible way to make sense of these insights within a unified model of attitude shift which in turn helps chart out clear avenues for future research.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005188 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In Press (To Appear 2021). Annual Review of Linguistics. Vol. 7
keywords:	perspective-shift, indexical-shift, perspectival anaphora, perspective vs. context, intensionality, implicational shifty variation, semantics, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v3 [August 2020] v2 [May 2020] v1 [May 2020]
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