Another accident
Thanks guys for all the great comments about accidentally taking another guy’s loaf of bread. I share all your intuitions, and I definitely should have realized the parallels to accidentally kicking someone you didn’t mean to kick, or accidentally eating something you didn’t mean to (being a vegetarian myself). So let me ask a follow-up, which will lead to why I asked the first question.
Question 2: could you describe the situation as Sal accidentally took a loaf of bread?
I think not. Without anything in the sentence to contrast the real state-of-affairs with Sal’s mistaken view of the world, “accidentally” doesn’t work. Everything in the sentence is consistent with what Sal meant to do.
The first thing this means is that accidentally is one of those adverbs that creates a non-monotonic context. That is, normally Sal took Tom’s loaf of bread entails Sal took a loaf of bread because a loaf includes Tom’s loaf. But when you add accidentally, the entailment stops working (assuming my intuitions about Question 2 are correct).
Now, why did I ask the original question? It seemed that in many “accidentally”-sentences, there are alternatives: Jack’s ass vs Sal’s in Erik’s comment. If there were two loaves of bread, then there would be an alternative: Sal took Tom’s loaf instead of his own. But in the situation I concocted, there was really only one loaf: just different ways it could relate to different people. Sal didn’t take one loaf rather than another; he took a loaf thinking it had property X when it really had property Y. And that’s enough, I suppose, to license the description “accidentally.”
So then there’s another question. Let’s say Sal walks through Tom’s property, and let’s say that (for some reason irrelevant to us) that is illegal. But Sal doesn’t know that. Did he accidentally walk through Tom’s property? Where Sal thinks Tom’s property has attribute X (legal-to-walk-through) when it has attribute Y (illegal-to-walk-through).
Comments(2)
Oh, good, I was hoping you’d follow up with a post as to why you were asking.
I definitely share the intuition that the aspect that was accidental has to be present in the sentence. Taking my airplane-buying ticket example from the last post, if I meant to buy tickets to San Francisco, I can’t say “I accidentally bought plane tickets for the 24th”; if I meant to buy tickets for the 25th, I can’t say “I accidentally bought plane tickets to Atlanta”.
In event semantics terms: there’s an event of me buying plane tickets to Atlanta on the 24th, but it seems clear that it’s not the event being described as “accidental”, or else any naming of the event with “accidentally” should be fine. Or, in your last example: I definitely think that “Sal accidentally walked through Tom’s property” isn’t true here. But even though the event of “Sal walking through Tom’s property” is the same event as “Sal breaking the law”, it’s true that “Sal accidentally broke the law”.
So it also seems clear to me that there’s intensionality going on. That is, just as two different definite descriptions of the same individual can’t necessarily be substituted in an intensional context, two different descriptions of the same event can’t necessarily be substituted under “accidentally”. (Or X intended to ___.)
I too share your intuition, but with a caveat. When I as a kid, my mother had an old college friend with whom we would spend frequent weekends. The friend had a daughter who was a few years younger than I was. She was adopted after her parents had tried for years to have a child of their own. Needless to say, she was doted upon incessantly and got away with a lot more than I did. I distinctly remember a weekend where she had drawn on her hand with permanent marker for a puppet show. When our mothers caught it at her, and asked, “What do you think you’re doing?” she replied, “I accidentally drew a face on my hand.” The mother laughed and she was off the hook; my younger sister, who had participated, got in trouble.
It seems that the agentivity of a verb can be somewhat weakened by ‘accidentally’ in the same way that a reflexive can strengthen it, at least in child-speak. But it doesn’t work if your mom’s a tough cookie like mine was. :)