German D-Pronouns in Attitude Contexts

Other than English, the German pronominal system offers multiple forms aside from a regular personal pronoun to refer to entities in a discourse. For the form that has received most attention – the d-pronoun die/der – it has been argued that its reference is constrained by perspectival properties of the respective discourse participants (Hinterwimmer & Bosch 2016). Focusing on attitude contexts, I provide data that shows that d-pronouns cannot be bound de se while a de re interpretation is possible, at least for some speakers. I derive this fact by analogy with epithets, which share the distribution in attitude contexts with d-pronouns, as well as an expressive component.

Output:

– Don’t give me that attitude! Anti-De Se and Feature Matching of German D-Pronouns. Poster at 49th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS49) @Cornell, October 2018. [poster]

– On German D-pronouns as Anti-Logophoric: Limiting a Competition-Based Account. Poster at Workshop on “Pronouns in Competition” @UC Santa Cruz, April 2018. [poster]