The latest installment in a running series … philosophy thoughts had while listening to Smiths songs.

So presumably the desire-ascription in the title of _I Want The One I Can’t Have_ is meant to be _de re_ rather than _de dicto_. There is some particular one that Morrissey can’t have, and he wants him/her/it. But I was wondering whether it was possible to have a _de dicto_ interpretation of the title. We could start meandering off here into the wisdom of self-destructive desires, but there’s a more pressing matter of syntax and semantics to attend to.

It’s rather hard, on its own, to read the title as a claim that Morrissey wants the one, whoever it is, he can’t have, as such. But we should be able to get that reading out, because when the title appears inside a quantifier it is clearly meant to have (something like) the _de dicto_ reading. As in…

bq. Not being able to eat dishes containing stewed rhubarb is so awful. It always seems to brighten up anything, from steak to green curry. But I can’t eat it. Most of the time I’m completely paralysed ordering food because I look at the menu and I want the one I can’t have.

Not _entirely_ natural English, but I think you get the drift. (I was toying with an example closer to the original meaning of the title, but it seemed a little tacky.) Anyway, maybe the whinger in this example could, when he walks into a new restaurant, say on inductive grounds “I want the one I can’t have”, meaning he wants the dish, whatever it is, that he can’t have because it contains rhubarb.

It’s tricky to do a full analysis of this because it’s tricky to analyse sentences of the form _I want NP_. The temptation is to treat them as being elliptical for _I want to VP NP_, and then treat that as elliptical for _I want that I VP NP_, and then analyse _I want_ as a modal. This is all a little absurd, but if we just treat _want_ in _I want NP_ as a regular transitive verb, it is hard to see how to get the _de re_ / _de dicto_ distinction to fall out. Since I’m sure that this is a relatively well-trodden area of syntax/sematics, I won’t try and resolve it here.