Counteridenticals and dream reports

Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clausescontain an identity statement, e.g. If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress. Here, we argue thatcounteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticalsand dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggestan analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dreamreports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized ascentered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of if licenses the presence of an imagine-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause ‘x be-PAST y’ is taken under;The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of theidentity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporatePercus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has severaladvantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning,as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals andcorrectly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.Keywords: Counteridenticals, counterfactuals, dream reports, pronoun movement