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The Clitic ‘lo’ in Italian, Propositional Attitudes and Presuppositions

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Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and Ramifications

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 22))

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Abstract

In this chapter I have used pronominal clitics in Italian in combination with verbs of propositional attitude to shed light on the opacity effects caused by intrusive pragmatics (at the level of free enrichments/explicatures). Certain problems, as discussed by Schiffer (Propositional attitudes in direct-reference semantics. In: Jaszczolt, Katarzyna (ed) The pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. Elsevier, Oxford, pp 14–30, 2000), completely disappear when the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of propositional clitics are discussed and such considerations are extended to propositional attitudes in general. In this chapter, I will add that a propositional clause must be in an appositional relationship (resulting from free enrichment and, thus, not actually present in the syntax) with the that-clause embedded in verbs of propositional attitude. I consider the consequences of this position. One of the most cogent results of this chapter is that pronominal clitics refer back to full propositions (if they refer to propositions at all) and not to minimal propositions. I take my own considerations on clitics to give support to the interesting and important considerations on emergent presuppositions by Kecskes and Zhang (Pragmat Cogn 17/2:331–355, 2009).

The socio-cognitive approach emphasizes that common ground is a dynamic construct that is mutually constructed by interlocutors throughout the communicative process. The core and emergent components join in the construction of common ground in all stages, although they may contribute to the construction process in different ways, to different extents, and in different phases of the communicative process.

Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 331)

…let us say that a TEXT is a set of instructions from a speaker to a hearer on how to construct a particular DISCOURSE MODEL. The model will contain DISCOURSE ENTITIES, ATTRIBUTES, and LINKS between entities.

Prince (1981, 235)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The literature on Greek is not unanimous and some authors opt for clitic doubling, as noted by a referee. See also Anagnostopoulou (2007). This is not problematic for me.

  2. 2.

    Also see Leonetti (2007), who adopts the considerations in Capone (2000).

  3. 3.

    Nocentini agrees with Capone that the doubling of a propositional object by a clitic is typically associated with factivity.

  4. 4.

    I take this to be a case of right dislocation which is different from clitic doubling.

  5. 5.

    M-implicatures can be dealt with by Relevance Theory by noticing the extra effort introduced by apparently redundant constructions and by offsetting such extra effort by some extra contextual effects.

  6. 6.

    Che Giovanni è andato al cinema, Maria lo sa bene.

    (That John went to the cinema, it Mary knows well).

  7. 7.

    A reviewer takes issue with my pragmatic story because he thinks that the pragmatic effects are independent of the syntax of clitics. “Issues of knowledge and reliability in interpretation are independent from the grammar of clitic pronouns and I do not see any reason to assume that the clitic is linked to an implicit modal element”. But the reviewer has probably misunderstood my position, as my discussion is to show that pragmatics, given the constraints of syntax, is able to provide modal interpretations. The pragmatics I have constructed is not dependent on the syntax, but must presuppose it. Free enrichment is usually obtained by furnishing constituents of thought that are combined with syntactic constituents which are actually present.

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  1. Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

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Capone, A. (2019). The Clitic ‘lo’ in Italian, Propositional Attitudes and Presuppositions. In: Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and Ramifications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19146-7_13

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