« Je t’aime. – Moi aussi (je t’aime). »

Abstract

In dialogs like “I love you – I do too”, the pronoun in the ellipsis site can be interpreted as dependent on the preceding overt pronoun (i.e. I do love you too). This dependency can neither be explained by Kaplan’s (1977/1989) theory implying the fixity of indexicals, nor by the various theories of bound indexicals: due to mismatch in person features, the identity in the ellipsis is not sloppy, but supersloppy in such cases. Based on experimentally collected English data, I proposed in Charnavel (2019) to reduce supersloppy readings to sloppy readings by hypothesizing that indexicals can be interpreted as context-dependent descriptions containing a bindable pronoun, i.e. as indexical e-type pronouns (e.g. you as my interlocutor). But due to some limitations in my English data, I left open two interrelated issues: (i) whether supersloppy readings, like sloppy readings, rely on focus blindness to presuppositions of bound pronouns; (ii) whether supersloppy readings can be analyzed in the same way in ellipsis and focus constructions. I here use novel French data to settle these two issues partly based on some morphosyntactic specificities of French. By clarifying the analysis of supersloppy readings, this provides new insight into the theories of indexicals and e-type pronouns.

Keywords

• indexical
• sloppy/strict readings
• e-type pronoun
• person feature
• French