Temporal Counteridentity and Imagining De Nunc

Abstract In temporal counteridenticals like ‘Ian is imagining that it is 2030 and Sally is rich’, the subject locates themself at a time other than (what they believe to be) the current time. In such reports, tense in the embedded clause can denote the time that the attitude holder imagines herself to be located at, or the time that she believes herself to be located at. I show that these two interpretations are subject to systematic constraints. The observed pattern is parallel to that discovered in Pearson (in prep.) for personal counteridenticals, such as Lakoff’s famous Brigitte Bardot sentence. I propose an analysis of these findings that depends on two key assumptions: (1) there is a mechanism of ‘de nunc binding’ that encodes the ‘subjective now’ of the attitude holder; and (2) this mechanism is constrained by a principle of the grammar called ‘Condition CW’, originally proposed for personal counteridenticals in Pearson (in prep.). These findings support the view that attitudes de se and de nunc constitute a special class, not reducible to de re. They further suggest that there is a dedicated linguistic mechanism for encoding such attitudes that is subject to systematic grammatical constraints.