Summing up, we might thus say the following: Earlier, I have explained the peculiarity of “he himself” statements by saying that in them we are speaking of the individual in question, not of whoever happens to be referred to by a term. Thus, e.g., “a knows that he himself is b” becomes “(∃x)(x = a & K_a(x = b))” while “a knows
that a is b” will be “K_a(a = b).” There is no need to modify this point in the slightest. However, it has to be complemented by an account of the principles of individuation on which the bound variable x relies. The point I have tried to make is that in the case of “he himself” these principles are typically (though not always)
situational (“individuation by acquaintance”).

when you consider what we intuitively might guess is a semantics for the adnominal ER, this really stops becoming mysterious. our theory will say something about how the adnominal ER is presupposing that its neighbor NP’s referent is some kind of scalar endpoint–in order to place the referent here on any kind of scale, though, we’re going to need to know exactly who the NP is referring to.

for more, see hintikka’s on the attributions of “self-knowledge”

He’s not unattractive. I can see why you’d think he was cute. I mean, I mean, why he would think himself cute.

EDIT: seconds after posting, i realized that this isn’t a principle A violation at all because “think he cute” wouldn’t work at all here. “think” here isn’t the same “think” that takes a full CP, so there would be no principle A violation.

also, unrelatedly, here’s a strange adnominal ER usage, brought up in yesterday’s topics seminar:

Q: who’s in John’s apt?
A1: *He.
A2: Him.
A3: ?He himself.

(yes, I know that in A1 “he is” would be fine. the puzzle is why the adnominal ER should make A1 acceptable, if it is at all)

[from this post here at 23/6]

(h/t kevin, fiercely proud of his descriptivism)

if u eats meh, i r ACC

This isn’t a counterexample, but I couldn’t help but think of the ProperName+Dogg phenom.

Possible lexical entry for “Dogg” (following Jacobson’s triplet notation of phonological form, syntactic category, semantic extension):
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+name]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e[x[+gangsta]]>

So “Dogg” takes an individual and returns that individual with a +gangsta feature.

EDIT: so I was thinking about this on my way home for lunch, and I realized that my lexical entry needs to be revised a little. [+gangsta] should really just be a syntactic feature, allowing it to license other [+gangsta] constituents (e.g. “bling”, “fo-shizzle”). Semantically, “Dogg” has the extension of the identity function over individuals, defined only for individuals that are actually illin’–so really, its only effect is presuppositional.

Revised lexical entry:
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+gangsta]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e: x∈baller_S[x]>

where baller_S is the set of all individuals that be illin’.

Also, in episode 59 of the Wire (S05E09, also known as the penultimate), the character Michael Lee delivers an epicly sweet case of contrastive focus reduplication [see the Salad-Salad Paper]: “Is that Big Walter-Big Walter or skinny Big Walter?”

EDIT (about an hour after posting Raj’s quote I read in the Wagner dissertation, p. 62):

The important lesson to learn from the combinatorics of coordination is that whichever of the two options in (68) we employ, we should pick exactly one of them, since otherwise the combinatorial possibilities explode.

flip:

So imagine the following scenario. There is someone painting a new storefront sign to a diner. The sign reads Ham and Eggs. Now the owner of the diner comes out front to see how the sign is going, and he notices that the words are squished up together such that it is hard to read. He then tells the painter, “There needs to be more space between ‘Ham’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘Eggs’.”

A preview:

Listening to the lyrics and given the lack of any other contextually salient females in “I’m a Flirt”-land (the salience of possible “he” referents is established by the presence of guest performers on the track–T.I. and T-Pain–and the fact that the “right” is sung by someone other than Kelly), a natural way to interpret the last line is to co-index “she” and “her,” which of course represents a flagrant Principle B violation.

(For those of you who have voiced prior concern over my non-use of LaTex, I’m in the middle of going back to LaTex, but just had to punch this write-up out without thinking about which symbols need escaping and how to make things look like I would like them to. So, with luck the next write-up I post will look prettier with those pretty semantic evaluation brackets.)

Somewhat unrelatedly, I’d been meaning to blog this for a while now, but kept forgetting. A particularly snarky quote from Stephen Neale’s reply to Stanley & Szabo (2000):

Also, I find Stanley and Szabo’s own semantic account of quantifier matrix incompleteness quite plausible on one interpretation–it is vague enough to admit of many. It appears very late in their paper, most of which seems to constitute an attempt to blast the logical terrain so hard that when their theory finally emerges it will face no competition.