I read the (very good) Geoff Nunberg papers on ‘meaning transfer’ here and here. Geoff argues that there’s a big difference between sentences like (1) and (2).

(1) This is parked out back. (said while pointing to a car key)
(2) I am parked out back.

In (1) ‘this’ denotes the car by a sort of indirect demonstration. In (2) it denotes the speaker and says he has a surprising property, of being parked out back. There’s four ways to argue for this distinction.

First, the distinction accounts for the behaviour of plurals. When there are two cars involved, but only one key and one speaker, (1a) is fine but (2a) is bad

(1a) These are (*this is) parked out back
(2a) *We are (I am) parked out back.

Second, there are facts about gender agreement in languages where that is required that can only be explained if ‘this’ denotes a car and ‘I’ a person.

Third, in some related cases it seems we need to keep ‘I’ referring to the speaker in order to explain the behaviour of anaphors.

(3) Ringo squeezed himself into a tight space.

Finally, there are facts about how conjunction reduction behaves. (4) means that the car is made of plastic, (5) doesn’t mean that the car is late for a meeting.

(4) This is parked out back and [made of plastic] (*the wrong size for the left-hand door)
(5) I am parked out back and [late for a meeting] (*unlikely to start)

I’m convinced by these arguments. But I’m not convinced that there’s a meaning transfer involved, as opposed to a meaning extension. (I think Geoff means to oppose this view, though I couldn’t find a quote from either paper saying so explicitly.)

I think (tentatively) that (6) is OK

(6) Ringo is parked out back and so is a 61 Volkswagon.

If this is OK then ‘parked out back’ must denote a property of both cars and drivers. Which is to say the meaning of ‘parked out back’ in (2) isn’t transferred since it still denotes a property of cars, as much as extended. (This is all if (6) is OK, which I’m not confident about, but it’s not dreadful to my ear.)

On a slightly unrelated point, I liked the following disanalogy that Geoff notices. If I utter (7) I just mean that I had six glasses/bottles of beer made by Sam Adams, but if I utter (8) I mean that I had six different vintages of Grange.

(7) I had six Sam Adamses at Walter’s last night.
(8) I had six Granges at Walter’s last night.

But if we replace six with half-a-dozen, my impression is that the asymmetry starts to fade.

(9) I had half-a-dozen Sam Adamses at Walter’s last night.
(10) I had half-a-dozen Granges at Walter’s last night.

If I’d had six glasses of the 89 Grange at Walter’s, I might use (10) to describe the experience, but I wouldn’t use (8). If I could afford to have six glasses of the 89 Grange I probably wouldn’t be writing here, but that’s a different comparison.