Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART I GENERAL STUDIES
- PART II PARTICULAR STUDIES
- 5 ON THE INTERPRETATION OF ‘DONKEY’-SENTENCES
- 6 GENERIC INFORMATION, CONDITIONAL CONTEXTS AND CONSTRAINTS
- 7 DATA SEMANTICS AND THE PRAGMATICS OF INDICATIVE CONDITIONALS
- 8 REMARKS ON THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF CONDITIONALS
- 9 THE USE OF CONDITIONALS IN INDUCEMENTS AND DETERRENTS
- 10 CONDITIONALS AND SPEECH ACTS
- 11 CONSTRAINTS ON THE FORM AND MEANING OF THE PROTASIS
- 12 CONDITIONALS, CONCESSIVE CONDITIONALS AND CONCESSIVES: AREAS OF CONTRAST, OVERLAP AND NEUTRALIZATION
- 13 THE REALIS–IRREALIS CONTINUUM IN THE CLASSICAL GREEK CONDITIONAL
- 14 THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF si-CLAUSES IN ROMANCE
- 15 FIRST STEPS IN ACQUIRING CONDITIONALS
- 16 THE ACQUISITION OF TEMPORALS AND CONDITIONALS
- 17 CONDITIONALS ARE DISCOURSE-BOUND
- 18 CONDITIONALS IN DISCOURSE: A TEXT-BASED STUDY FROM ENGLISH
- Index of names
- Index of languages
- Index of subjects
5 - ON THE INTERPRETATION OF ‘DONKEY’-SENTENCES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART I GENERAL STUDIES
- PART II PARTICULAR STUDIES
- 5 ON THE INTERPRETATION OF ‘DONKEY’-SENTENCES
- 6 GENERIC INFORMATION, CONDITIONAL CONTEXTS AND CONSTRAINTS
- 7 DATA SEMANTICS AND THE PRAGMATICS OF INDICATIVE CONDITIONALS
- 8 REMARKS ON THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF CONDITIONALS
- 9 THE USE OF CONDITIONALS IN INDUCEMENTS AND DETERRENTS
- 10 CONDITIONALS AND SPEECH ACTS
- 11 CONSTRAINTS ON THE FORM AND MEANING OF THE PROTASIS
- 12 CONDITIONALS, CONCESSIVE CONDITIONALS AND CONCESSIVES: AREAS OF CONTRAST, OVERLAP AND NEUTRALIZATION
- 13 THE REALIS–IRREALIS CONTINUUM IN THE CLASSICAL GREEK CONDITIONAL
- 14 THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF si-CLAUSES IN ROMANCE
- 15 FIRST STEPS IN ACQUIRING CONDITIONALS
- 16 THE ACQUISITION OF TEMPORALS AND CONDITIONALS
- 17 CONDITIONALS ARE DISCOURSE-BOUND
- 18 CONDITIONALS IN DISCOURSE: A TEXT-BASED STUDY FROM ENGLISH
- Index of names
- Index of languages
- Index of subjects
Summary
Editors' note. Conditionals systematically affect the dependencies that may obtain between pronouns and their antecedents when they occur in the two different clauses of conditional sentences. Paradigmatic of such interactions are the ‘donkey’-sentences which have preoccupied linguistic theory and philosophical accounts of reference and quantification for a considerable time. Reinhart's paper presents a syntactic and semantic account of such sentences. All indefinite noun phrases are taken to be bound by other quantifiers and operators. This resolves the problem of interaction and shows that the phenomenon can be generalized to a much wider class, including some plurals.
THE PROBLEM
The so-called ‘donkey’-sentences pose well-known problems both to the semantic theory of scope and to the theory of anaphora:
(1) a. If Max owns a donkey, he hates it
b. If a vampire checks in, Lucie invites him to dinner
The pronoun in sentence (1a) can be anaphoric to a donkey, and the crucial point is that this is a case of bound-variable anaphora, rather than of pragmatic coreference. This can be observed if we compare such sentences with others having adverbial clauses, e.g.:
(2) a. When Max owned a donkey, he hated it
b. Since a stranger came in with a donkey, we had to provide some hay for it
In the sentences of (2) the pronoun refers to a specific donkey. Although the antecedent is indefinite, it has a fixed value; hence, this is a case of pragmatic coreference.
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- Chapter
- Information
- On Conditionals , pp. 103 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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