Gender in conditionals

Fabio Del Prete (1) , Sandro Zucchi (2)

1 CLLE - Cognition, langues, langage, ergonomie
2 Dipartimento di Filosofia

The 3sg pronouns "he" and "she" impose descriptive gender conditions (being male/female) on their referents. These conditions are standardly analyzed as presuppositions (Cooper 1983, Heim & Kratzer 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 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters.

Mots clés: conditionals; pronouns; gender presuppositions; context; indexicals; monsters

Domaines: Linguistique; Philosophie

Fabio Del Prete, Sandro Zucchi. Gender in conditionals. Linguistics and Philosophy, 2021, 44, pp.953-980. ⟨10.1007/s10988-020-09307-6⟩. ⟨hal-02095923⟩