Universal and Existential Readings of Donkey Sentences and the Role of a Structural Form of Domain Restriction in the Explanation of Some Distributional Anomalies

Abstract

I propose that a particular form of quantifier domain restriction is responsible for the unexpected readings of some donkey-sentences. The pragmatic restrictions that I take into account are shown to be recoverable from the linguistic structure of the sentences involved, according to a syntactic algorithm. Making domain restrictions explicit at LF enables one to keep both quantifying determiners and donkey-pronouns unambiguous, and to preserve monotonicity properties of quantifiers.