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Donkey anaphora

SYNTAX/SEMANTICS: 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" <x,y> (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

LIT. Cooper, R. (1979)
Evans, G. (1977)
Geach, P. (1962)
Heim, I. (1982)
Heim, I. (1990)
Kamp, H. (1981)
Lewis, D. (1975)
Ruys, E. (1992)