{"pk":1258,"title":"Interpreting referential noun phrases in belief reports – the de re/de dicto competition","subtitle":null,"abstract":"

The de re/de dicto ambiguity centers on the referential and/or attributive properties of noun phrases within the scope of intentional operators, such as belief reports. For instance, in the belief report \"Julie believes Elizabeth’s poem will win the competition,\" a de re reading of the embedded referential noun phrase \"Elizabeth’s poem\" entails that the referential association between this noun phrase and the target poem is true from the speaker's perspective but may not be recognized as such in the belief holder’s (i.e., Julie’s) mind. In contrast, a de dicto reading describes Julie’s beliefs as she understands the referential association in her mind. While both de re and de dicto readings of definite noun phrases are considered acceptable, given different supporting contexts, we show that the acceptability of de re readings is vulnerable to contextual and pragmatic manipulations. One such case involves a context in which the belief holder, Julie, holds a mistaken belief about the identity of the poem, such as thinking that it was written by Nicole when, in reality, it was written by Elizabeth. This mistaken identity context introduces a de dicto reading of a competing noun phrase, \"Nicole’s poem,\" in \"Julie believes Nicole’s poem will win the competition.\" In this context, the speaker-oriented de re reading of \"Elizabeth’s poem\" has a roughly bimodal acceptability distribution, while the de dicto noun phrase was overall preferred. Our study is the first to systematically lay out the empirical landscape of de re/de dicto readings of definite noun phrases and highlights the vulnerability of the de re reading. This investigation solidifies the foundation for further theory development and endorses the practice of collecting reliable empirical judgment data for nuanced semantic phenomena.

","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Regular Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71c5p23s","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yuhan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":"Linguistics"},{"first_name":"Kathryn","middle_name":"","last_name":"Davidson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":"Linguistics"}],"date_submitted":"2023-04-02T17:37:49.435000Z","date_accepted":"2024-05-03T23:54:29.748000Z","date_published":"2024-07-02T20:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/1258/galley/14511/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/1258/galley/14510/download/"},{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/1258/galley/14511/download/"}]}