burger king has a new ad campaign.
(1) BK minis are easy to share. But that doesn't mean they're easy to share.
of course, using at-first-sight-ungrammatical/infelicitous slogans (perhaps to shock you into paying attention?) isn't anything new (campbell's "soup that eats like a meal" comes to mind). but this seems dangerously close to the kind of ling-101-semantics-lecture level of contradiction that should be impossible for any speaker.
so why isn't it so bad? it seems to me to be a case of two kinds of implicit arguments. they way i believe we're meant to interpret the slogan as (2), where i've put the interpretation of the implicit argument in square brackets:
(2) a. BK minis are easy [one] to share.
b. But that doesn't mean they're easy [you] to share.
that is, (2a) is a generic statement about the by-design nature of the product small and sharable -- for anyone. but (2b) is a specific statement about the actual state of affairs for you, the listener. the being-advertised-to.
perhaps this distinction between the two implicit arguments in (2a) and (2b) is clearer in a variation of (1), as in (3):
(3) I know BK minis supposed to be easy [one] to share. But that dosn't mean they were easy [me] to share when I bought them yesterday.
to be clear, the second sentence cannot involve a "I" controlling a PRO (there is no c-command in this case). it seems that this context just facilitates a generic interpretation in the first sentence, and a specific one in the second.
these implicit arguments would seem to be what are generally put under the umbrella of PROarb. that is, a PRO-like silent category that can have arbitrary reference. what i think (1) shows is that PROarb can come in two different flavors: generic or specific. does that mean that we need two different lexical items, PROarb-gen and PROarb-spec? or, does semantics/pragmatics distinguish the two in the relevant way so that (1) is not a contradiction?
i don't know much about the PROarb literature. but this is my i-don't-know-much-about-this-topic-but-i'll-speculate-about-it-anyway answer. as always: thoughts?
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