Attribution semantics: Linguistic worlds and point of view

Abstract

The success of semantic theory depends on an account of cognitive point of view in which all meanings expressed in a text are attributed to their personal or purported personal sources. This can be accomplished in an interpretive theory assigning all text to Linguistic Worlds (LWs). A special deictic LW, needed for default attribution to the speaker, and useful for describing parentheticals, evaluative adjectives, and epitheticals, gives the capacity to characterize shifts in point of view that accompany the indirect first‐person speech of expressive language, as in temporal and stylistic shifts. The existence of the deictic LW also suggests that the relativity of indexicals is primarily a structural matter and pragmatic only in the default case.