Sentence containing a pronoun with clear meaning but unclear syntactic role
In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is semantically bound) but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists.[a] Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.[b]
Barker and Shan define a donkey pronoun as "a pronoun that lies outside the restrictor of a quantifier or the if-clause of a conditional, yet covaries with some quantificational element inside it, usually an indefinite."[3] The pronoun in question is sometimes termed a donkey pronoun or donkey anaphora.
The following sentences are examples of donkey sentences.
"Omne homo habens asinum videt illum." ("Every man who owns a donkey sees it") — Walter Burley (1328), De puritate artis logicae tractatus longior[4][5]
"Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it."[6]
"Every police officer who arrested a murderer insulted him."
^Maier, Emar (20 Nov 2006). "Situations and Individuals by Paul D. Elbourne". LINGUIST List (review). 17 (3393).
^Lewis, David (1998). Papers in Philosophical Logic(PDF). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 3.[permanent dead link]
^Barker, Chris; Shan, Chung-chieh (9 June 2008). "Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding". Semantics and Pragmatics. 1 (1): 1–46. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1. ISSN 1937-8912. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
^Gualterus Burlaeus (1988). De puritate artis logicae tractatus longior. Meiner Verlag. ISBN 9783787307173.
^Keith Allan (2010). Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics. Elsevier. ISBN 9780080959696.
^Peter Geach (1962). Reference and Generality. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press – via philosophieweb0.001.free.fr/GeachRandG.pdf.
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