Special thanks to three anonymous referees and to both editors of Semantics and Pragmatics, who provided exceptionally detailed comments and criticisms. A shorter and less technical version of this theory is developed in Schlenker 2009; some expository parts are common to both papers.

Abstract:Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue (building in particular on (Banfield, 1982) and (Doron, 1991)) that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals (including here, now and the demonstratives) are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise when the two contexts are distinct, and exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated. Word Count: 10,909 IntroductionIndexicals are normally defined as expressions whose reference is fixed by the context of speech. But the latter notion, I will argue (following (Banfield, 1982) and (Doron, 1991)), should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. The Context of Thought is the point at which a thought originates; it includes a thinker, a time of thought and a world of thought (in some cases a thought might also have an intended addressee, especially if it corresponds to a speech act). The Context of Utterance is the point at which the thought is expressed; it includes a speaker, a hearer, a time of utterance and a world of utterance 1 . The difference rarely matters in everyday life: a person's mouth is located near a person's brain, and as a result the point at which a thought is formed is not significantly different from that at which it is expressed. If we were very different creatures, we might be able to have our brain in one location and to express its thoughts in another. The distinction would then be much more useful, as it would allow us to distinguish, say, between a here of intention (denoting things near the point where the thought was formed) from a here of expression (denoting things near the point where the thought was expressed). Although this situation doesn't seem to arise in real life, there are two literary styles in which the narrator presents things as if the Context of Thought were significantly different from the Context of Utterance 2 : narrations in Free Indirect Discourse (='Represented Speech and Thought', in Banfield's terminology) and narrations in the Historical Present. In such cases natural language indexicals are seen to fall into two lexical categories, depending on the context with respect to which they are evaluated: (i) tenses 3 and pronouns depend on the Context of Utterance, while (ii) all other indexicals (including the demonstratives, as well as here, now, and yesterday) depend on the Context of Thought. The surprising fact, then, is that these literary styles provide evidence for a grammatical distinction that * Thanks to Edit Doron, Paul Egré, Orin Percus, Barry Schein and Benjamin Spector for discussion of the some of the data. Special thanks to Ann Banfield, Edit Doron, Yael Sharvit and an anonymous reviewer fo...

In the 1980's, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a 'dynamic turn' in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We explore an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics with two pragmatic principles of manner, Be

According to a theoretical tradition dating back to Aristotle, verbs can be classified into two broad categories. Telic verbs (e.g., “decide,” “sell,” “die”) encode a logical endpoint, whereas atelic verbs (e.g., “think,” “negotiate,” “run”) do not, and the denoted event could therefore logically continue indefinitely. Here we show that sign languages encode telicity in a seemingly universal way and moreover that even nonsigners lacking any prior experience with sign language understand these encodings. In experiments 1–5, nonsigning English speakers accurately distinguished between telic (e.g., “decide”) and atelic (e.g., “think”) signs from (the historically unrelated) Italian Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Turkish Sign Language. These results were not due to participants' inferring that the sign merely imitated the action in question. In experiment 6, we used pseudosigns to show that the presence of a salient visual boundary at the end of a gesture was sufficient to elicit telic interpretations, whereas repeated movement without salient boundaries elicited atelic interpretations. Experiments 7–10 confirmed that these visual cues were used by all of the sign languages studied here. Together, these results suggest that signers and nonsigners share universally accessible notions of telicity as well as universally accessible “mapping biases” between telicity and visual form.