Donkey sentences have a wide range of readings (sometimes called weak and strong, or existential and universal). So it is puzzling that a given donkey sentence is usually not perceived as ambiguous. This talk presents a wide range of (hopefully) entertaining as well as instructive examples of donkey sentences from the literature, reviews some key points about the readings of donkey sentences, and presents a recent proposal that accounts for the range of readings they have as well as why they are usually perceived as unambiguous. We suggest that 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 an independently motivated pragmatic theory, originally developed by Manuel Križ for definite plurals, fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on previous work by Reinhard Muskens and others, we define a general schema for dynamic quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. (This talk presents joint work with Dylan Bumford and Robert Henderson, recently published in Semantics and Pragmatics. Available at https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.12.1.)
Conferencista
Lucas Champollion
Lucas Champollion
Resumo →
Lucas Champollion
Donkeys Under Discussion
Donkey sentences have a wide range of readings (sometimes called weak and strong, or existential and universal). So it is puzzling that a given donkey sentence is usually not perceived as ambiguous. This talk presents a wide range of (hopefully) entertaining as well as instructive examples of donkey sentences from the literature, reviews some key points about the readings of donkey sentences, and presents a recent proposal that accounts for the range of readings they have as well as why they are usually perceived as unambiguous. We suggest that 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 an independently motivated pragmatic theory, originally developed by Manuel Križ for definite plurals, fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on previous work by Reinhard Muskens and others, we define a general schema for dynamic quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. (This talk presents joint work with Dylan Bumford and Robert Henderson, recently published in Semantics and Pragmatics. Available at https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.12.1.)