Donkey Anaphora in Sign Language: Evidence from LSF and ASL

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 syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches (e.g. Kamp & Reyle 1993) took this measure to apply solely to indefinites; recent dynamic approaches extended it to all quantifiers (e.g. van den Berg 1996, Nouwen 2006, Brasoveanu 2007). By contrast, proponents of E-type analyses take the pronoun to go proxy for a definite description (e.g. 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 well as other operators) as quantifiers over fine-grained situations. Thus competing accounts of donkey anaphora make rather different claims about the coindexing relations that should be found. While these are not morphologically visible in spoken languages, they arguable are in sign languages (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2004); these are thus an interesting testing ground for the debate. We argue that data from French and American Sign Language favor recent dynamic approaches: 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; and it appears that the same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent, which argues in favor of recent dynamic approaches over older ones.