Ken Safir. “Person, Context and Perspective”. To appear in Italian Journal of Linguistics in 2005.

In this essay I defend the thesis that the indexicality of first person pronouns is a restriction on the pronouns themselves, as opposed to any operator that binds them. The nature of this restriction is a constant function from individuals to the context of utterance of a sort I will describe (following Kaplan, 1989)). This means that constant functions are essentially asyntactic, so that the pronouns they restrict never require any antecedent, neither an operator nor an argument (although this does not prevent them from participating in bound readings if an appropriate antecedent is introduced). Purported parallels between agents of utterance and propositional attitude agents will be rejected, and as a result, indexical pronouns such as first person ones will be contrasted with logophoric pronouns, which are necessarily operator-bound by perspectival operators (introduced by propositional attitude verbs like think, believe and say). The scopesensitive properties of operator-binding and the perspectival interpretations that are imposed on logophoricity distinguish the latter from constant function phenomena, which are sensitive neither to scope, as it is usually treated, nor perspectival shifts. Finally some evidence is provided to show that third person nominals can be restricted by constant functions, and two such examples are lightly explored: the English generic pronoun one and the proximate/obviative distinction in languages like Fox.