When and why can 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns be bound variables? Rose-Marie Déchaine Martina Wiltschko University of British Columbia 1. Against Inherent Indexicality 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns are generally considered to be genuine examples of indexical expressions (Fillmore 1971). Consider the examples in (1) (1) a. I got a question from the audience b. You did your homework The 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns (I and you) in (1) are indexicals in the sense that their referent is dependent on the context of use: 1 st singular forms index the speaker; 2 nd singular forms index the addressee. Moreover, according to a pervasive view in the literature “the meaning of the [indexical] word provides a rule which determines the referent in terms of certain aspects of the context"(Kaplan 1989, p. 490). If so, this would imply that both indexicality and the interpretive process associated with it are features of particular lexical items. On this view, 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns are intrinsically indexical: we call this the “intrinsic indexicality hypothesis”. The intrinsic indexicality hypothesis faces a major challenge in light of the fact that 1 st and 2 nd person pronouns can be interpreted as bound variable anaphors (Partee 1989: Fn 3). Consider the examples in (2). (2) a. Only I got a question that I understood (nobody else did) = (i) λx [x got a question that y SPEAKER understood] (…nobody else got a question that I understood) = (ii) λx [x got a question that x understood (…nobody else got a question that they understood)