Abstract

Argues that the first person pronoun is always directly referential, against more recent findings of Heim (1991,2008), Kratzer (1998,2008) and others. Shows how purported evidence of syntactically bound or `fake' indexical I, involving sloppy ellipsis and only, and de se attitude reporting can be reconciled with a strict Kaplanian semantics. Proposes alternative treatments of these phenomena that bypass the syntactic LF level, going straight from surface to semantics/pragmatics