An Antinomy about Anaphora
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Almotahari-2011-An Antinomy about Anaphora.pdf
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Author(s)
Almotahari, Mahrad
Date Issued
July 2011
Journal
Linguistic Inquiry
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Almotahari, Mahrad. “An Antinomy about Anaphora.” Linguistic Inquiry 42 (2011): 509-517. © 2011 MIT Press.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Standard theories of so-called donkey anaphora (Kamp 1981, Heim
1982, Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991) predict that sentence (1) is truth conditionally
equivalent to (2).
(1) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
(2) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats every donkey that he owns.
I will refer to the proposition expressed by (2) as the strong reading
of (1). A nonstandard theory, defended by King (1993, 2004), predicts
that (1) is equivalent to (3).
(3) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats a donkey that he owns. The proposition expressed by (3) is the weak reading of (1). Although the authors I have referred to disagree about how best
to interpret (1), they agree that (1) is not ambiguous; it semantically
expresses no more than one reading. Not everyone shares this opinion,
though. Schubert and Pelletier (1989), Kanazawa (1994), and Chierchia
(1995) suggested that sentences relevantly like (1) are ambiguous.
2 Consider, for example, sentences (4)–(6).
(4) Everyone who owns an umbrella leaves it at home on a sunny day.
(5) Everyone who owns an umbrella uses it on a rainy day.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/LING_a_00056
