“Between Scylla and Charybdis”: The semantics and pragmatics of attitudes “de se”

In this paper I propose that pragmatic principles and mechanisms are at play in the recovery of ‘de se’ attitudes in English (and in Italian), in cases in which grammatical and semantic information does not exclusively determine the ‘de se’ interpretation. I claim that the pragmatic processes at work in utterances reporting ‘de se’ attitudes are cases of free enrichment. In free enrichments, although there does not seem to be either an overt indexical or a covert slot in the linguistically decoded logical form of the sentence uttered, the logical form nevertheless needs to be conceptually enriched in the explicature (Huang 2007:191). I develop my view in the relevance-theoretic framework, according to which the human cognitive system works in such a way as to tend to maximize relevance with respect to communication, the principle of relevance being responsible for both the explicit and implicit content of an utterance. However, I should acknowledge that I was also influenced by Levinson’s (2000) ideas about pragmatic intrusion. I propose to add another type of intrusive construction: attitudes ‘de se’.