Overlapping reference

Overlapping reference is situation where two referring expressions are not disjoint in reference, but not strictly coreferential either.

Example

the ill-formed idiom *we lost my way requires we and my to be strictly co-referential (cf. I lost my way), but we and my only have an overlapping reference, hence the ill-formedness.

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding, Foris, Dordrecht.
• Lasnik, H. 1989. Essays on anaphora, Reidel, Dordrecht