Found:
Pronoun of laziness
SYNTAX: a pronoun which is only partially co-referential with an
antecedent.
EXAMPLE: if the sentence John gave his hat to me, but Bill gave it
to Sarah is intended to mean that I got John's hat and Sarah Bill's hat, the
pronoun it does not have the same (intended) referent as his hat,
and thus is only 'lazily' co-referential with the full NP. If one takes the
sentence to have a logical form like [John:x [x gave [x's hat] to me ] and [Bill:y
gave [y's hat] to Sarah] with his a bound variable, it can be
taken to be a copy of its antecedent (x's hat), rather than being co-referential
with it. Full implementation of this analysis by means of
lambda-abstraction is, however,
more involved.
LIT. | Haik, I. (1986) Partee, B.H. (1978) |