De Dicto Omnibus, or How to control PRO

A study of the behavior of obligatorily or non obligatorily controlled PRO yields the conclusion that PRO and its antecedent must be intensionally identical for the (unique) thinker whose attitude report is the smallest such report including the control relation, the de dicto omnibus requirement. Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLingBuzz
Main Author Sportiche, Dominique
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Tromso Universitetet i Tromsoe 01.11.2019
Subjects
Antecedents
Attitudes
Semantics
Syntax
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Summary:A study of the behavior of obligatorily or non obligatorily controlled PRO yields the conclusion that PRO and its antecedent must be intensionally identical for the (unique) thinker whose attitude report is the smallest such report including the control relation, the de dicto omnibus requirement. This behavior is uniform in all cases of obligatorily and non obligatorily control.The mandatory de te and de se readings found in obligatory control constructions under attitude control predicates and, as shown, also in some non obligatory control cases, is argued not to be due to lexical properties of attitude predicates, unlike in all prevalent accounts, and is instead reduced to subcases of this de dicto omnibus requirement. The existence of these readings is attributed to that of particular descriptions that attitude holders must have, as a matter of cognitive necessity, of themselves and others in relation to the content of their thoughts. Finally, the de dicto omnibus property is directly attributed to the control relation de?ned as involving not just referential dependence but concept identity.