Pronoun of laziness

Definition
Pronoun of laziness is a pronoun which is only partially co-referential with an antecedent.

Example
If the sentence John gave his hat to me, but Bill gave it to Sarah is intended to mean that I got John's hat and Sarah Bill's hat, the pronoun it does not have the same (intended) referent as his hat, and thus is only 'lazily' co-referential with the full NP. If one takes the sentence to have a logical form like [John:x [x gave [x's hat] to me ] and [Bill:y gave [y's hat] to Sarah] with his a bound variable, it can be taken to be a copy of its antecedent (x's hat), rather than being co-referential with it. Full implementation of this analysis by means of lambda-abstraction is, however, more involved.

Links
Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics