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

Fabio Del Prete (1)

1 CLLE - Cognition, langues, langage, ergonomie

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.

Domaines: Linguistique

Fabio Del Prete. Universal and Existential Readings of Donkey-Sentences and the Role of a Structural Form of Domain Restriction in the Explanation of Some Distributional Anomalies. P.J.E. Dekker; R.A.M. van Rooij. Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, 2003, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Amsterdam: ILLC, 2003, Proceedings of the Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium. ⟨hal-02364446⟩