Reporting, telling, and showing dreams
Linguistics and Philosophy March 27, 2026 Emar Maier
Abstract Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like ‘I dreamed that ...’. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by...