[Ads-l] I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the dope

[Laurence Horn]

> On Sep 10, 2016, at 5:34 PM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET> wrote:
> 
> Heard on the latest episode of the podcast "Criminal", which is a clip show celebrating 50 episodes. 
> 
> One clip had a woman talking about being in a unisex prison. Men bigly outnumbered the women, which worked out well for her because she was a drug addict and, as she said, "I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the dope." Context says that the intended meaning was "I'd be the girlfriend OF whoever had the dope," but the woman used some head inflection here, putting the possesive marker on "whoever". Composing the semantics of the original utterance by the usual rules, I get this as the (unintended) meaning: "For all situations Z such that there exists a unique person X such that there exists a person Y such that Y is the girlfriend of X and Y has the dope, Y = speaker."
> Later on I'll do some corpus-searching for "whoever's" to see what I get, but for now I'm just putting the attestation out here to see if it rings any bells for anyone.
> Neal
> 
You're gonna run into a lot of irrelevant contracted copulas, I'd expect:  "I can serve whoever's next".  FWIW I can process the utterance above with no problem whatsoever, with the intended meaning, even if I shouldn't can.  I'm pretty sure I've never uttered it myself, though.

LH
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