37.1085, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Maciej Tarnowski & Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, "What 'We' Can Mean"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1085. Tue Mar 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1085, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Maciej Tarnowski & Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, "What 'We' Can Mean"

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Date: 16-Mar-2026
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere Seminar: Maciej Tarnowski & Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, "What 'We' Can Mean"


Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the
project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and
Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR
(https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by
specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to a talk by
Katarzyna Kijania-Placek & Maciej Tarnowski (Jagiellonian University,
Krakow) entitled  "What 'We' Can Mean" (see the abstract below). The
event takes place online on Friday, MARCH 27, 11.00-12.30 Western
European Time (WET). Please write to danczeman at gmail.com for the Zoom
link.
All welcome!
ASBTRACT:
In this talk, we present a semantic account of the first-person plural
pronoun - "we" in English - that comprises all systematic kinds of use
of this expression. We argue that "we" exhibits five systematic types
of meaning - directly referential, descriptive, deferred, anaphoric,
and bound - each associated with a distinct Kaplan-style character. We
show that these different meanings of "we" satisfy standard
diagnostics for systematic polysemy, including non-zeugmatic
co-predication across different senses, cross-linguistic robustness,
and productivity across other plural pronouns and singular terms.
Building on this, we introduce a two-dimensional model of polysemy in
which lexical meaning consists of a set of rule-based characters
capable of generating context-sensitive contents. This framework,
which naturally extends to other singular terms, including
demonstratives and proper names, preserves the Kaplanian treatment of
indexicality while explaining descriptive and deferred uses of
indexicals.

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Pragmatics
                     Semantics




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