Donkeys under discussion

Abstract

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of non-maximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how hearers use Questions under Discussion to fix the interpretation of donkey sentences in context. We propose that the denotations of such sentences involve truth-value gaps -in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false -and demonstrate that Križ's pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens's (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, we define a general schema for dynamic quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008,

Gaps in the interpretation of pronouns

“…The idea that we want to capitalize on is that the ambiguity arises when speakers are unable to select a unique referent for a particular pronoun; in such a situation, vagueness ensues, of a trivalent nature, following ideas from Champollion et al 2017. As there are different ways this vagueness may be resolved in context, the sentence consequently receives different readings, accounting for both the ambiguity and the examples discussed in the previous section.…”

“…His proposal is to distinguish between a weak and a strong indefinite; the former is responsible for existential readings and the latter for universal readings. As noted by Champollion et al (2017), this predicts that a single indefinite may not antecede both an existentially interpreted pronoun and a universally interpreted pronoun. This is not borne out as the example from Champollion et al 2017, repeated in (38), shows.…”

“…This ties back to the problem mentioned in the introduction of deriving the default readings of donkey sentences. Champollion et al (2017), using ideas from Križ 2016, provide such a procedure. Their procedure relies on the question under discussion to recover the missing truth-values.…”

“…Champollion et al 2017. The trivalent treatment of vagueness in the present paper is adapted from an original idea of Champollion et al (2017). The main difference between my approach and theirs concerns the origin of the vagueness.…”

“…I will accept this fact and propose the following explanation to it: pronouns that have multiple referential targets, as do pronouns anteceded by indefinites with more than one witness, have vague reference. The treatment of vagueness is the trivalent semantics offered in Champollion et al 2017, supplemented with a projection rule. The resulting theory will correctly predict existential/universal ambiguity across the board and narrow pseudo-scope readings.…”