Efectos metalingüisticos y metacontextuales

Abstract

Some assertions that are not about the meanings of the words used can transmit information about those meanings. In (Mena, 2022) I offered an explanation of that phenomenon purely in semantic terms. The novelty of that theory consists in including interpretations of language in circumstances of evaluation: the parameters relative to which we evaluate the contents of linguistic expressions. In this paper I argue that assertions of sentences containing indexicals can communicate information about the context of use, even though those sentences are not about contexts. Given this, I offer an extension of my theory of metalinguistic effects to model indexicals in an analogous way. Also, I discuss the many ways in which the theory presented here differs from other bidimensional semantics.