Over on Language Log, Mark Liberman has posted about “sloppy identity” in anaphoric expressions, using an ambiguous exchange in a cartoon as a starting point:
(A) Woman 1 [talking about romance with her husband]: I close my eyes and imagine he’s Tom Hanks.
(B) Woman 2: What if he’s doing the same?
Do the same in Woman 2’s question can be taken in (at least) three ways: as referring to Woman 1’s husband imagining that he’s making love to Tom Hanks (the gay reading, which then becomes the comic point of the strip, since this wasn’t what Woman 2 intended); as referring to Woman 1’s husband imagining that he’s making love to a celebrity (parallel to Woman 1’s imagining that she’s making love to a celebrity); and as referring to Woman 1’s husband imagining that he’s Tom Hanks. This is an exceptionally complex example — more complex than the standard examples in the literature on syntax and semantics — but the second interpretation clearly illustrates “sloppy identity”, with a shift, between the speakers, in how Tom Hanks enters into the love-making.
Simpler examples from Mark’s posting:
George is losing his hair, but Bill isn’t [losing his hair].
Sally forgot her mother’s birthday, but Julia didn’t [forget her mother’s birthday].
The first would normally be understood as having sloppy identity, while the second is ambiguous between strict and sloppy readings (you just have to know the context).
(I was a bit startled to discover that sloppy identity hadn’t come up on Language Log before this posting of Mark’s. On this blog, I’ve touched on it only one time, briefly (here).)
Now, from my files, another example about as complex as the cartoon example. From the tv show Bonanza:, the character Hoss speaking:
You can’t blame yourself for that [the death of the addressee’s father], no more than I can.
This would at first appear to be straightforward — Hoss takes no blame for the addressee’s father’s death — but in context it’s to be understood as something like
You can’t blame yourself for that [the death of the addressee’s father], no more than I can blame myself for this.
with this referring to the addressee’s being crippled. And in the episode this stunning shift in implict referents works. Most of the time, sloppy identity isn’t problematic (and it’s something of a marvel that it isn’t), though of course you can use it to float a joke, as in the cartoon exchange.
