Abstract
Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clausescontain an identity statement, e.g. If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress. Here, we argue thatcounteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticalsand dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggestan analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dreamreports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized ascentered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of if licenses the presence of an imagine-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause ‘x be-PAST y’ is taken under;The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of theidentity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporatePercus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has severaladvantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning,as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals andcorrectly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.Keywords: Counteridenticals, counterfactuals, dream reports, pronoun movement
Highlights
Counteridenticals are conditionals with the following two properties: First and foremost, they are counterfactual conditionals, meaning that the propositions embedded in their antecedent clauses do not hold in the actual world
We argue contrary to existing proposals of counteridentical meaning (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) that counteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports, which already receive a similar intuitive interpretation as counteridenticals: when dreaming, we may identify two inherently distinct entities with each other
The pronouns of both constructions obey the Oneiric Reference Constraint (ORC), a syntactic constraint on pronoun movement that rules out any LF for dream reports in which some pronoun referring to the dream-self is asymmetrically c-commanded by a pronoun referring to the actual entity
Summary
Counteridenticals are conditionals with the following two properties: First and foremost, they are counterfactual conditionals, meaning that the propositions embedded in their antecedent clauses do not hold in the actual world. From the above examples we derive the following intuitive meaning of counteridenticals, and it is the aim of this paper to capture it in formal terms: A speaker is imagining a counterfactual world In this contrary-to-fact world, the subject and the predicate entities of the antecedent clause have been identified with each other, leading to the creation of a counterpart of the. The counterpart entity that lives in a counteridentical world is a composed individual—it contains properties of both the antecedent clause’s subject and predicate entity, i.e. the referents of the clause’s subject and predicate This becomes evident when considering scenarios like the following: Imagine that we are dress shopping.
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