Donkey anaphora

Donkey anaphora is a type of anaphoric relation obtaining in a range of constructions that apparently preclude straightforward bound variable anaphora or coreference. In (i):

(i) every farmer who owns a donkey beats it

the pronoun is interpretively dependent upon a donkey. However, coreference cannot obtain since a donkey does not have a single reference that might be shared by it, since a donkey is in the scope of the universal quantifier. But the pronoun also cannot be interpreted as a variable bound (i.e. a bound variable) by a donkey, since it is not in the scope of that expression. Two types of analyses have been proposed, both of which face various problems. E-type analyses (Cooper 1979, Evans 1977, Heim 1990) take the pronoun to function as a definite description which copies its descriptive content from the context (of utterance): "the unique donkey that x owns". Unselective binding analyses take the pronoun as a variable 'unselectively' bound (Lewis 1975) by every, resulting in a universal quantification over pairs, as in (ii).

(ii) All" &lt;x,y&gt; (x owns donkey y) (x beats y)

This approach, which requires a non-quantificational interpretation of indefinite NPs that function as donkey antecedents, has been implemented in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982). Other well-known donkey-contexts are conditional clause type examples (iii)a and the relatively under-researched VP-conjunction examples (iii)b.

(iii) a	 if a man comes in here, he will trip the switch b	 every farmer owns some donkeys and feeds them at night

Link
Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics