Chris Potts has a searchable collection of interesting linguistic examples: “Linguistic Oddities”. Here’s one (a real-life i-within-i case, discovered by Barbara Partee):
This lanky seventeenth of his billionaire father’s twenty-four sons had done much to inspire young Muslims with the romance of anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
Chris’ project is of course reminiscent of Jim McCawley’s fabulous Linguistic Flea Circus, which Jim distributed once a year (a collected edition was once published by the Indiana University Linguistics Club).
Can’t resist pointing out that this is not a true “i-within-i” case (depending, of course, on how one defines that) - but it’s no more so than, e.g.:
Osama(i) is his(i) father’s seventheenth son(i).
We all know that that’s not a real i-within-i violation because the indices here are just misleading; his is not “bound” within the phrase “his father’s son” but is just a free pronoun which can be “accidentally coreferential” to “Osama”. Same here, since this presumably was within a context where the referent (I think it was indeed Osama) was already under discussion. So “his” is just a free pronoun here.
January 16th, 2007, at 5:28 pm #Polly Jacobson