What 'We' Can Mean

Maciej Tarnowski (Jagiellonian University), Katarzyna Kijania-Placek (Jagiellonian University)

Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to a talk by Katarzyna Kijania-Placek & Maciej Tarnowski (Jagiellonian University) entitled  "What 'We' Can Mean" (see the abstract below). The event takes place online on Friday, MARCH 27, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ASBTRACT:

In this talk, we present a semantic account of the first-person plural pronoun -„we” in English - that comprises all systematic kinds of use of this expression. We argue that "we" exhibits five systematic types of meaning - directly referential, descriptive, deferred, anaphoric, and bound - each associated with a distinct Kaplan-style character. We show that these different meanings of „we" satisfy standard diagnostics for systematic polysemy, including non-zeugmatic co-predication across different senses, cross-linguistic robustness, and productivity across other plural pronouns and singular terms. Building on this, we introduce a two-dimensional model of polysemy in which lexical meaning consists of a set of rule-based characters capable of generating context-sensitive contents. This framework, which naturally extends to other singular terms, including demonstratives and proper names, preserves the Kaplanian treatment of indexicality while explaining descriptive and deferred uses of indexicals.