Pronouns and mentions

A paraître dans un volume intitulé : "Comparing anaphors", Lita Lunquist et Iørn Korzen, éditeurs. Coppenhagen; Research of the last decades in semantics have tried to establish, for some restricted pronominal paradigms, that pronouns have a core meaning. Evans (1980) claims that there are few (somewhat) related models for pronouns, and Kamp (1981) implements a formalism with a unified meaning for pronouns In this paper, I will focus on French “personal” pronouns il, elle, le, lui, en, y , , and I will discuss some data difficult to accommodate in the classical Evans/Kamp models :a) Some varieties of pay-check sentences ; b) anaphora by pronouns to parts of idioms; c) revision sentences discussed by Strawson (1952). I will argue that this bunch of cases points to a unified theory of pronouns seen as “echos of mentions”, a mention being a discourse event involving the use of a linguistic expression of a certain kind. I try to make explicit what is metaphorically meant by the term “echo” in the above formulation.