DRAFT OF WORK IN PROGRESS; COMMENTS WELCOMED!
Donkey Demonstratives1 Barbara Abbott
[email protected] 1. Introduction. This paper considers an approach to the interpretation of ‘donkey sentences’ which seems to have been undeservedly neglected, so neglected that it is not included in the list of four possible interpretation types given by Kanazawa (1994, ex. 5.-8.) and shown in (1): (1) a. E-type reading: Q farmer who owns a donkey beats the donkey he owns. b. Pair quantification reading: Q{|farmer(x) ∧ donkey(y) ∧ own(x, y)}{|beat(x, y)}. c. Weak reading: Q farmer who owns a donkey beats a donkey he owns. d. Strong reading: Q farmer who owns a donkey beats every donkey he owns. nor even the list of seven given by Schubert & Pelletier (1989, ex. 7.), shown in (2): (2) If Pedro owns a donkey, he will ride it to town tomorrow. a. [Deictic Reading] If Pedro owns a donkey, Pedro will ride [some otherwise specified object, not any donkey mentioned in the antecedent] to town tomorrow b. [Generic Reading] Pedro has the habitual disposition to generally ride donkeys Pedro owns to town tomorrow c. [Universal Reading] For any donkey x, if Pedro owns x, Pedro will ride x to town tomorrow. d. [Specific Existential Reading] If Pedro owns a certain donkey [e.g. the speaker might ‘mean’ Annabelle], Pedro will ride it to town tomorrow e. [Non-Specific Existential Reading] There is some donkey x such that if Pedro owns x, Pedro will ride x to town tomorrow f. [Definite Lazy Reading] If Pedro owns a donkey, Pedro will ride the donkey Pedro owns to town tomorrow g. [Indefinite Lazy Reading] If Pedro owns a donkey, Pedro will ride some donkey Pedro owns to town tomorrow This is an approach which views the pronouns in question (hereinafter occasionally ‘donkey pronouns’) as similar to demonstrative phrases.2 For Schubert & Pelletier’s example in (2) this would be (2h): 1
This paper was presented at the Annual LSA meeting Washington DC, January 2001, and I am grateful to the audience for their comments. 2 Curiously, Robin Cooper seems to have briefly considered this alternative. He remarks concerning one example of a donkey pronoun, that it ‘is not exactly demonstrative, since it is related to an NP that occurs earlier in the discourse’ (1979, 72). But, as the sentence in (2h) shows, demonstratives, like personal
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(2)
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[Demonstrative Reading] If Pedro owns a donkey, Pedro will ride that donkey to town tomorrow This neglected option has some intuitive support; pre-theoretically (2h) does seem to be a closer paraphrase of (2) than any of the other options suggested in (1) and (2). In the remainder of this paper I want to outline some of the advantages of the demonstrative view. 2. Uniqueness. One well-known problem with E-type approaches is that they contain a uniqueness entailment that is not always welcome. The sentence in (2f) entails that if Pedro owns a donkey he owns at most one. That does not seem faithful to (2), and the entailment runs into more serious problems in e.g. (3) – (6), well known from the literature. (3) Socrates kicked a dog and it bit him and then Socrates kicked another dog and it did not bite him. (4) Socrates has a dog and he feeds it tasty morsels; Socrates has another dog but he only feeds that dog scraps. (5) Everybody who bought a sageplant here bought 8 others along with it. [= Heim 1982, ex. 12, p. 89.] (6) No father with a teenage son lends him the car on weekdays. [= Rooth 1987, ex. 48.] In each case replacing the relevant donkey pronoun with a demonstrative gives a satisfactory paraphrase: (3) a. Socrates kicked a dog and that dog bit him and then.… (4) a. Socrates has a dog and he feeds that dog tasty morsels…. (5) a. Everybody who bought a sageplant here bought 8 others along with that sageplant. (6) a. No father with a teenage son lends that son the car on weekdays. Although (3) - (6) indicate that (2) does not ENTAIL that if Pedro owns a donkey he owns only one, nevertheless (2) does CONVEY that assumption. The sentences in (7) also convey this idea. (7) a. Pedro owns a donkey. b. Every farmer owns a donkey. c. Most of the shoppers bought a sageplant. This suggests that the uniqueness implication is not due to the pronoun in (2), but is instead an upper-bounding scalar implicature.3 Other examples, such as the conditional donkey sentences in (8) and (9), lack this implicature. pronouns, can be anaphoric as well as deictic. Cooper does not seem to be the only one to assume that demonstratives cannot be anaphoric; c.f. e.g. Larson & Segal 1995, 201, von Heusinger 1997, 61. Of course it may be that all of these people consider demonstratives to be, by definition, expressions keyed to the nonlinguistic context, so that that donkey in (2h) would not count as a demonstrative. In any case there are exceptions to the neglect of the perspective supported in this paper, e.g. Wilson 1991 and Slater 1997, 2000. 3 Schubert & Pelletier (1989, 200) suggest that this implicature of at most one donkey comes from cultural assumptions about typical Latin American donkey-owners, but its presence in (7c) suggests that is not the case. This kind of upper-bounding implicature is common in a variety of contexts.
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If someone is in Athens, he is not in Rhodes. [ ≈ Heim 1982, ex. 1, p. 44; the Stoic Chrysippos is credited.] (9) If a girl is brought up in Australia, she learns to swim early. [ = S. Barker 1997, ex. 3.] In order to solve the problem presented by ‘sageplant’ examples while maintaining the definite description analysis, Neale 1990 modified Evans’ E-type approach by suggesting a type of definite description unmarked for number (cf. Neale 1990, 228ff). (10) Every farmer who owned a donkey vaccinated it. a. Every farmer who owned a donkey vaccinated whatever donkey(s) they owned. [Neale 1990] (The approach in Lappin & Francez 1994, employing maximal i-sums, gives a similar result in these cases.) While the paraphrase in (10a) gets rid of the assumption that each farmer who owned a donkey owned at most one, it maintains another entailment of Evans’ E-type approach namely that all of the donkeys owned by the farmers got vaccinated. While for independent reasons that entailment may seem to hold for (10) (see the discussion below), that is not the case for other donkey examples, e.g. (11) I have to show this document to three colleagues. They are in a meeting…. I have to show it to at least two other colleagues, but they have already left…. [≈ Kadmon 1990, ex. 11.] See also examples (3) and (4) above. This issue reappears in the guise of the ‘strong’ reading of donkey sentences, discussed below in § 4. (8)
3. Incomplete descriptions and the problem of ‘indistinguishable participants’ At this point you may be wondering how the demonstrative analysis would be different from Evans’ E-type analysis, but employing an INCOMPLETE definite description – one which does not contain sufficient descriptive material to uniquely identify a referent. Good question. Indeed (2i) (2) i. If Pedro owns a donkey, he will ride the donkey into town.. seems as good a paraphrase of (2) as (2h), with the demonstrative that donkey. Ultimately there may be no difference. It depends on whether incomplete definite descriptions are best viewed as a type of demonstrative or not. (See Larson & Segal 1995, Ch. 9, and the works cited there for discussion.) The utility in thinking in terms of demonstratives is that it makes patent the role of speaker intentions in determining the referent. Use of an explicit demonstrative phrase may include a nominal head, which may (Burge 1974) or may not (Larson & Segal 1995, 213) narrow down the choice of a referent as far as determining the truth or falsity of what the speaker said. But in any case the descriptive content does not have to apply UNIQUELY; rather the speaker’s intention fixes the reference of the phrase and any descriptive material is an aid to the addressee in figuring out which entity that is. Exactly the same seems to hold of donkey pronouns. This helps with another problem for E-type approaches which Heim called ‘the problem of indistinguishable participants’. One of her examples is given in (12). (12) If a man shares an apartment with another man, he shares the housework with him…. [= Heim 1990, ex. 22.]
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Here we have two pronouns, each of which on the classic E-type analysis would be viewed as substituting for a phrase like ‘the man who shares an apartment with another man’. The more modern approach, following Cooper 1979, invokes a function from either situations or entities located in them to referents. The problem in either case is the same – there seems to be no way to distinguish either uniquely descriptive or functional content for the two intended referents in (12). This problem is reminiscent of the problem of incomplete definite descriptions, which Blackburn 1988 and others have argued simply has no descriptive solution. The demonstrative approach reinforces the conclusion that there is no implied content sufficient to characterize the intended referent uniquely. It seems clear that the determination of the referent is supplied by the intention of the speaker, and that the speaker typically will have no uniquely identifying characteristics in mind (aside perhaps from the characteristic of being the entity he or she intends to be speaking about). This goes not only for examples like (12), but for any use of an anaphoric pronoun. Donkey pronouns are pronouns and as such, it seems misguided to regard them as encoding any descriptive content other than features of person, gender and number.4 4. Weak vs. strong readings A core issue which arises in connection with donkey sentences, especially universally quantified ones, is that of weak vs. strong, or existential vs. universal, interpretations. Kanazawa’s schematic paraphrases for weak and strong readings, given above in (1), are repeated here. (1) c. Weak reading: Q farmer who owns a donkey beats a donkey he owns. d. Strong reading: Q farmer who owns a donkey beats every donkey he owns. This issue only arises in cases where, contrary to the upper-bounding conversational implicature cited above, there is more than one entity satisfying the conditions of the antecedent clause. The issue then is, how many of these entities must also have the main predicate apply to them. For (10), for example, the issue is how many donkeys must have been vaccinated by a multiple-donkey-owning farmer. Neale’s analysis gives the strong reading; Schubert & Pelletier’s analysis of conditional donkey sentences (such as (2)) gives the weak reading. Others (e.g. Rooth 1987; Heim 1990; Chierchia 1992, 1995; Kanazawa 1994; Lappin & Francez 1994), argue that either reading is possible depending on facts about the particular example. As many have noted, following Rooth 1987, judgments are not secure on these issues. Rooth 1987 compares the sentences in (13): (13) a. Every man who owns a donkey beats it. b. Every donkey which is owned by a man is beaten by him. He remarks: 4
This position appears to be in direct opposition to Chierchia when he remarks: ‘the linguistic and extralinguistic context can supply descriptions which can be exploited to reconstruct the intended value of a pronoun’ (Chierchia 1995, 113), assuming that he is speaking about the CONTENT of a pronoun, and thus about a grammatical reconstruction rather than a purely pragmatic one. Of course Chierchia would not be alone in this opinion.
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…suppose John owns ten donkeys and beats exactly nine of them, and that every other man beats every donkey he owns. Then is [13a] true? Informants have given me varied and guarded judgements about this case. What everyone agrees however is that [13b] is false under these circumstances. (Rooth 1987, 253f) This difference in clarity of intuitions is important, since if (13a) were assigned the strong, universal reading semantically, it would have just the same truth conditions as (13b), but that does not seem to be the case. On the other hand the weak paraphrase in (1c) has been claimed to be the only, or the dominant, reading for examples such as Schubert & Pelletier’s example (2) (2) If Pedro owns a donkey, he will ride it to town tomorrow. as well as the relative clause examples in (14). (Chierchia attributes (14a) to Robin Cooper; (14b) is based on an example in Schubert & Pelletier 1989.) (14) a. Every person who has a credit card will pay his bill with it. [= Chierchia 1992, ex. 6a]. b. Every person who has a dime will put it in the meter. [= Chierchia 1992, 6b] c. Every man who has a daughter thinks she is the most beautiful girl in the world. [= Cooper 1979, ex. 60] Although it is less obvious, I believe the weak paraphrase is also not completely accurate, even for these examples. Consider (2) for example. Even if Pedro has more than one donkey it would be unlikely for him to ride more than one of them into town. Schubert & Pelletier argue that (2) would nevertheless be true under such circumstances, contrary to what the strong reading says. However they are also aware of a bit of tension in this circumstance. Note that if we imagine a context in which people who own any donkeys at all own more than one, then (2) is definitely strained. I believe the same holds for the examples in (14a) and (14b). Cooper’s example (14c) is jocular, not only in attributing many beliefs at most one of which could be accurate, but also (contra Cooper as well as the weak paraphrase) in attributing contradictory beliefs to fathers with more than one daughter. I believe that the strain in these examples is obscured because our real world assumptions allow for many cases where the ‘at most one’ implicature is satisfied, and where, when it is not, the plurality is often not extreme (i.e. people may have only 2 or 3 credit cards, dimes in their pocket, or daughters). However consider (15): ?? (15) Everybody who has ever gone to a movie went to see it last Friday. If the weak reading paraphrase were accurate then (16) should be as natural as (16a). (15) a. Everybody who has ever gone to a movie went to see a movie they had gone to last Friday. But it isn’t. Instead it is odd, because we naturally assume that anybody who has ever gone to one movie has gone to many. The demonstrative paraphrase preserves the strangeness of (15): ?? (15) b. Everybody who has ever gone to a movie went to see that movie last Friday. Of the researchers in this area Kanazawa has been the one to most clearly recognize the weakness of judgements in these situations, even pointing out that one of his informants refuses to accept the weak reading of (14b) (Kanazawa 1994, 116, n. 12). Kanazawa also notes Rooth’s observation that, when the ‘at most one’ implicature is not satisfied, people’s intuitions about donkey sentences seem to be clear only in cases where
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it is assumed that the pronominal entities are treated consistently – e.g. each multipledonkey-owning farmer either vaccinates all or none of their donkeys (Rooth 1987, 256). Noting that under these circumstances the difference in truth conditions between weak and strong readings collapses, Kanazawa makes the following observation: (16) Empirical observation: People’s intuitions about donkey sentences with respect to consistent donkey-beating situations accord with the truth conditions given by the weak reading and the strong reading. [= Kanazawa 1994, ex. 16] On the present approach this observation is explained as a consequence of the fact that the consistent situations are ones in which speakers are not required to exercise intuitions that go beyond the kind of case where the conversational implicature of ‘at most one’ is satisfied. Kanazawa has also been the researcher most concerned with the need to account for the weakness and variability of judgments matched against inconsistent situations. In the more speculative portion of his paper Kanazawa suggests that donkey sentences may actually be indeterminate in interpretation as far as the grammar goes, and that when people are forced to make decisions they use general heuristics whose aim is to extend basic reasoning patterns which work for the quantifiers in question in ordinary sentences without donkey anaphora. The data we are considering support that conclusion. This raises the question of formal implementation of the approach backed here. There is time left only to remark that the correctness of the demonstrative paraphrase does not by itself decide among various options currently being explored. In particular, although this paraphrase may be suggestive of the E-type approach of e.g. Heim 1991 and Lappin & Francez 1994, nevertheless overt demonstrative phrases can behave like bound variable pronouns, as illustrated in (17): (17) Mary spoke in turn to every student who was waiting and gave that student a grade. This suggests that a dynamic binding approach as in e.g. Kanazawa 1994 or Chierchia 1995 is not automatically excluded. Further consideration must await another occasion.
REFERENCES Barker, S.J. 1997. E-type pronouns, DRT, dynamic semantics and the quantifier/variable-binding model. Linguistics and Philosophy 20, 195-228. Blackburn, William K. 1988. Wettstein on definite descriptions. Philosophical Studies 53, 263-278. Burge, Tyler. 1974. Demonstrative constructions, reference, and truth. Journal of Philosophy 71, 205-223. Chierchia, Gennaro. 1992. Anaphora and dynamic binding. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 111-184. Chierchia, Gennaro. 1995. Dynamics of meaning: Anaphora, presupposition, and the theory of grammar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cooper, Robin. 1979. The interpretation of pronouns. In Frank Heny & Helmut S. Schnelle, eds., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 10: Selections from the Third Groningen Round Table. New York: Academic Press, 61-92.
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Evans, Gareth. 1977. Pronouns, quantifiers, and relative clauses. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7, 467-536. Evans, Gareth. 1980. Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 337-362. Heim, Irene. 1982. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts doctoral dissertation. Heim, Irene. 1990. E-type pronouns and donkey anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 13, 137-178. Kadmon, Nirit. 1990. Uniqueness. Linguistics and Philosophy 13, 273-324. Kanazawa, Makoto. 1994. Weak vs. strong readings of donkey sentences and monotonicity inference in a dynamic setting. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 109158. Lappin, Shalom & Nissim Francez. 1994. E-type pronouns, i-sums, and donkey anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 391-428. Larson, Richard & Gabriel Segal. 1995. Knowledge of meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neale, Stephen. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rooth, Mats. 1987. Noun phrase interpretation in Montague Grammar, File Change Semantics, and Situation Semantics. In Peter Gärdenfors, ed., Generalized quantifiers: Linguistic and logical approaches. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 237-268. Schubert, Lenhart K. & Francis Jeffry Pelletier. 1989. Generically speaking, or, using discourse representation theory to interpret generics. In Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee & Raymond Turner, eds., Properties, types and meaning, Volume II: Semantic issues. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 193-268.
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