Blocking de re readings across a perspectival domain

Shweta Akolkar (University of California, Berkeley)

Marathi (Southern Indo-Aryan) is described as having a long-distance anaphor, apəɳ, which in argument positions can only be coreferent with a non-local subject (Wali et al. 1991, Pandharipande 1998). It has not previously been noted that there is a perspectival component to the semantics of long-distance apəɳ: it is licensed only in attitude reports, where it must refer de se to the attitude holder. More surprisingly, no clausemate of apəɳ can be interpreted de re: names, definite descriptions, and properties must be read de dicto, and tense must be interpreted de se. Yet the apəɳ clause remains transparent to syntactic operations, like wh-dependencies and NPI licensing, and therefore resists a quotation analysis. I account for its properties by pursuing an operator-driven context shift analysis (Anand & Nevins 2004, Anand 2006, Deal 2020, a.o.), where apəɳ itself is a special type of shifted author-addressee indexical. The strict prohibition on de re is due to an operator in the clausal left periphery which 1) overwrites the context world parameter relative to which its complement is evaluated and 2) imposes a requirement that the attitude holder assent to the reported proposition at the attitude time and world.