Donkey pronouns in child Mandarin: Insights into the ∃/∀ dichotomy

Donkey pronouns and plural definites show similarities in exhibiting the existential/universal dichotomy with respect to monotonicity, discourse contexts and lexical semantics of the predicate with which they are combined. The parallel between the two elements suggests a unified analysis. Studies of children’s understanding of plural definites show that children initially interpret plural definites existentially rather than universally. The findings invite us to ask whether children also interpret donkey pronouns existentially. Two experiments were conducted to compare children’ and adults’ interpretation of donkey pronouns in conditional and relative-clause donkey sentences. The results of Experiment 1 show that children preferred the existential reading, whereas adults entertained the universal reading for both types of donkey sentences in upward-entailing contexts. Experiment 2 examined whether monotonicity influences the interpretation of donkey pronouns by creating a downward-entailing context. The findings were that in a downward-entailing context both children and adults preferred the existential reading. The findings led us to propose that the existential reading is perhaps the default semantics of donkey pronouns while the universal reading is derived, and we suggest that the derivational path is bridged by free choice strengthening. The findings were then discussed in relation to the unified analysis of plural definites by Magri (2014) and Bar-Lev (2018).

Homogeneity in donkey sentences

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. I extend the pragmatic theory of homogeneity in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. I propose that a semantic theory produces truth value gaps in certain scenarios, and a pragmatic theory fills these gaps in context-dependent ways. By locating the parallel between donkey pronouns and definite plurals is located in the pragmatics rather than in the semantics, I avoid problems known to arise for some previous accounts according to which donkey pronouns and definite plurals both have plural referents (Krifka 1996; Yoon 1996). I sketch an extension of plural compositional DRT (Brasoveanu 2008) that delivers the required truth value gaps by building on concepts from error-state semantics and supervaluation quantifiers.

Counterfactual Donkey Sentences: A Strict Conditional Analysis

We explore a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ readings in counterfactual donkey sentences and observe three open issues in the current literature on these sentences: (i) van Rooij (2006) and Wang (2009) make different empirical predictions with respect to the availability of ‘high’ donkey readings. We settle this question in favour of van Rooij’s (2006) analysis. (ii) This analysis overgenerates with respect to weak readings in so-called ‘identificational’ donkey sentences. We argue that pronouns in these sentences should not be analysed as donkey pronouns, but as concealed questions or as part of a cleft. (iii) The analysis also undergenerates with respect to NPI licensing in counterfactual antecedents. We propose a strict conditional semantics for counterfactual donkey sentences that derives the correct licensing facts.