Abstract:
There are two main approaches to the
problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey, he beats it). Proponents of dynamic approaches take
the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of
quantification so as to allow an indefinite to bind a variable that is
not within its scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to
apply solely to indefinites; recent dynamic approaches have extended it
to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of E-type analyses take the pronoun
to go proxy for a definite description (with it = the donkey, or the donkey that John owns).
While competing accounts make very different claims about the
coindexing relations that are found in the syntax, these are not
morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are in sign
languages, namely through pointing. In the first part of this paper, we
argue that data from American and French Sign Language favor recent
dynamic approaches. First, in those cases in which E-type analyses and
dynamic analyses make different predictions about the formal connection
between a pronoun and its antecedent, dynamic analyses are at an
advantage. Second, the same formal mechanism is used irrespective of
the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent, which argues
for recent dynamic approaches over older ones. In the second part of
this paper, we investigate some constraints on the relation between a
donkey pronoun and its antecedent. We argue that binding across a
negative expression is possible, as long as the pronoun is presupposed
to have a non-empty denotation. We then display and explain subtle
differences between over sign language pronouns and all other pronouns
in examples involving ‘disjunctive antecedents’. Finally, we
provide
preliminary data that might shed light on three further problems:
‘donkey’ readings of proper names; ‘complement anaphora’; and reference
to ‘quantificational dependencies’.