Noncompositional

Consider the sentence: I just had the weirdest dream. This is the sort of assertion that the speaker gets privileged access to. Like so-called psych-predicates and other internal experience adjectives like hot and cold, only the person who dreamed can “really” know that she had a such-and-such type of dream, if it was scary or not, and so on. Anyone else who claims to have that knowledge is either running on hearsay, or in some sort of special situation where they get to either control the mental state of someone else (a hypnotist saying: “you feel very hot”) or a person acting as a conduit for others’ communications (a teacher reading aloud his pupil’s writing samples as she collects them: “Suzie is happy that her parents are home again, Ralph is anxious to …”).

Now consider tag questions (with opposite polarity from the main clause), like “This post is boring, isn’t it?” It’s pretty weird to get these with psych-predicates when the subject of the predicate is a 3rd person: Mitch was hot in the classroom, wasn’t he?. This would have to mean something like “Mitch seemed hot, didn’t he,” or even “Mitch said he was hot, didn’t he?” Having the tag question doesn’t let you automatically make claims that you couldn’t before. And with the 1st person? Also pretty odd: you don’t normally say Am I warm, so you wouldn’t say I’m warm, aren’t I? (you could, though, in a sort of talking-to-self mode: “I’m warm, aren’t I? I should put on a coat.” But note the intonation: it’s probably got a rising intonation on warm, stress on are, and falling intonation throughout the tag.). So imagine my ears picking up this sentence from an episode of Ghost Whisperer (which, no, I do not normally watch):

I just had the weirdest dream … didn’t I?. This is an interesting case of someone shifting the burden of awareness of one’s own mental state from themselves to someone else within the same utterance (well…technically I guess it’s two utterances). What happened was a ghost approached a bed where a couple was sleeping, and spoke haunting stuff to the husband. The wife wakes up, scares the ghost away, and then the husband wakes up to find his wife awake. He turns to her and says the first part of the utterance. Then, when she gives him this look, he goes on to say the second part.

So what’s interesting about this? Well, nothing much I guess. It shows, I suppose, the ability of people (or is that screenwriters) to quickly manipulate linguistic expressions as the situation changes. Note that the husband can use this tag question to inquire about whether not he was dreaming at all, ignoring the weirdest part. Normally if you’ve got a superlative adjective in there like that, a tag question will pick out that aspect of the question: He’s the tallest guy on the court, isn’t he? asks if he’s the tallest, not about whether or not he’s a guy (a simple “no” answer would usually be taken to mean “he isn’t the tallest,” not “he is actually a she.”) However, when hearing something like what the husband uttered, the wife (or anyone, I should imagine, if they can hold themselves together after having seen a ghost) wouldn’t balk and say, “How would I know if it was actually the weirdest dream?” They would correctly interpret it as a question of whether there was actually any dreaming going on.