E-Type pronouns and donkey anaphora

When the donkey lost its fleas: persistence, minimal situations, and embedded quantifiers

“…The Heim/Elbourne solution for donkey anaphora One recent promising use of situation semantics has been to solve a problem that arises in the resolution of donkey anaphora. This line of research was first suggested by Heim (1990), and elaborated in work such as Elbourne (2005), von Fintel (2004, 1995 and Büring (2004). In the following discussion I shall make reference directly only to Elbourne's theory; however, a similar point could be made with respect to the other implementations.…”

Wh-Conditionals in Vietnamese and Chinese: Against Unselective Binding

“…(Cheng and Huang 1996) Cheng and Huang (1996) argue that because wh-conditionals must be analyzed as unselective binding, recent attempts to do without unselective binding (e.g. Heim 1990, von Fintel 1995 are doomed to failure. If Cheng and Huang are right, unselective binding must be available in the grammars of natural languages.…”

“…There is no need to posit unselective binding in the grammars of natural languages; indefinites are always existential quantifiers, and the apparent effects of quantificational variability can be captured through situation semantics and other mechanisms (see Heim 1990, von Fintel 1995.…”

“…We also adopt Kratzer's (1989) and Heim's (1990) situation semantics for conditionals. Accordingly, the Vietnamese wh-conditional in (21), repeated below, is interpreted as in (25) The representation in (25) is exactly what sentence (21) means.…”

A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on the Expression of Manner

“…s combines with a proposition and the result is the subset of minimal situations within that proposition. The interpretation we propose for s-is given below: [Heim 1990, von Fintel 1994 Given this semantics for s-, the denotation of the clause sister to the determiner in (20) will be as in (25) According to (25), the clause headed by s-denotes the set of minimal situations that contain an event of Mary driving. What do such situations look like?…”