Donkey Anaphora in Sign Language I: E-Type vs. Dynamic Accounts

Abstract

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey,he beats it). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantification so as to allow an indefinite to bind a variable that is not within its scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to indefinites; recent dynamic approaches have extended it to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of E-type analyses take the pronoun to go proxy for a definite description (with it = the donkey, or the donkey that John owns); in order to satisfy its uniqueness presupposition, they combine this approach with an analysis of if-clauses as quantifiers over situations. While competing accounts make very different claims about the coindexing relations that should be found in the syntax, these relations are not morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are arguably realized in sign languages, namely through pointing. We argue that data from French and American Sign Language favor recent dynamic approaches. First, in those cases in which E-type analyses and dynamic analyses make different predictions about the formal connection between a pronoun and its antecedent, dynamic analyses are at an advantage. Second, it appears that the same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent, which argues for recent dynamic approaches over older ones.

Special thanks to Jeff Labes for help with LSF data, and to Jonathan Lamberton for help with ASL data. Thanks also to the audiences of the ‘Formal Approaches to Sign Language’ workshop (Bordeaux 2009) and of the Amsterdam Collqoquium (2009) – in particular to D. Lillo-Martin, C. Neidle, L. Champollion, R. Nouwen, and A. Brasoveanu – for constructive comments. The present work was supported in part by an NSF grant (BCS 0902671) and by a Euryi grant from the European Science Foundation (‘Presupposition: A Formal Pragmatic Approach’). Neither foundation is responsible for the claims made here.