The Theory of Syntax and the Representation of Indexicality

All languages have indexical expressions – i.e., expressions such as here, I, tomorrow, etc. The meaning of these items in a given language is always the same, but their reference depends on the peculiar context in which they appear. So, if Alessandra Giorgi is speaking on February 26 2008 and she utters I am happy today, I refers to Alessandra Giorgi, and today to February 26 2008, but it would not be so if the sentence were uttered at some other time by somebody else. These considerations seem to be quite independent from a theory of syntax. The syntax of a sentence such as I am happy today is apparently computed with no interaction with the context, and only if one wants to know the actual reference of the various items, one has to check who the speaker is and what day it is. In these pages I’m going to challenge this view, and I’ll show that a different perspective is in order, as a natural consequence of recent developments in the theory of the structure of clauses. I’ll propose in particular that the left-most position in the Complementizer layer is devoted to the representation of the speaker’s temporal – and possibly spatial as well – coordinates, as can be seen in languages like Italian from the distribution of verbal forms in complement clauses.