Interpreting the shifty first person inclusive pronoun in Marathi

Abstract

In some languages, indexicals (e.g. I, you, today) can shift in attitude reporting clauses to be interpreted with respect to the attitude context rather than the utterance context (Schlenker 1999; Anand & Nevins 2004; Anand 2006; Deal 2020, i.a.). This paper demonstrates that Marathi is a language with shiftable indexicals, but one which exhibits non-canonical properties. First, Marathi indexical shift enables the first person inclusive pronoun, rather than the first person singular pronoun, to refer to the attitude holder. Second, the shifted reading of the first person inclusive pronoun is available in mental attitude reports but not typical speech reports, in apparent violation of Deal’s (2020) and Sundaresan’s (2021) implicational hierarchies of indexical shift licensors. I propose a shifty operator-based analysis (Anand & Nevins 2004; Anand 2006) of this unusual pattern, which has implications for the semantics of mental attitude ascription.