Noncompositional

Paul Postal (I think) has a paper from a while ago on reference of pronouns. I’m not sure how he phrased the problem, but basically the observation is that pronouns can refer to roles or individuals (or both at the same time). Consider:

• Sam’s divorced his (ex-)wife three months after he married her.
• I was in Jill’s house before it burned down, but I guess you’ve only been in it after they rebuilt it.
• If you cut off a lizard’s tail, it will grow back.

Basically, the pronoun her refers to the individual (with current role ex-wife), and doesn’t care that now she’s an ex-wife but before she was the wife-to-be. On the other hand, the pronouns in the other sentences refer to the role of Jill’s house and lizard’s tail, but not the individual that had those roles - the same house that burned down wasn’t rebuilt. Of course, most times pronouns refer to both. But these are all third-person pronouns. Could you get this with 1st-person pronouns? You’d think not: I mean, “I is I is I” (or is that “I am me is me”?)

Well, Ricola has managed to do it, though across speakers. Ricola has this deal where they have a person out there who is coughing up a storm, and if you offer them a Ricola cough drop, you “could win a million dollars!” They have a radio commercial, where at the end you have this:

Man: The cougher could be a guy… Woman: Or I could be a woman.

Weird! It looks like I is the cougher, because otherwise the utterance is totally out there. Okay, there are cases where it’s fine: where the speaker isn’t sure what gender they are, or where their identity (and voice) are concealed, and they are giving hints in a 20-question style game (”Are you a famous woman?” –(voice scrambled) “I could be a woman”). Of course this is combined with the fact that the speaker is identifiably a woman. Could that second line have been done by a man? I’m gonna say “no.” How about if you replace “the cougher” with just “I,” where it’s understood that we’re talking about the cougher. Then I think maybe - maybe - they could both be guys. It would be totally funny, of course.

Now how about this:

Man: The cougher could be a guy… Woman: Or could I?

Good luck with that one.