Brasoveanu, Adrian 2007. Donkey Pluralities: Plural
Information States vs. Non-atomic Individuals, Stanford University ms. (August 31, 2007) that significantly revises and extends the
Sinn
und Bedeutung 11 paper with the same title.
The paper argues that two distinct and independent notions
of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and
quantification: plural reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference,
i.e. reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects
(e.g. atomic / non-atomic individuals) that is established and
subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following van den Berg
(1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural information
states (i.e. as sets of variable assignments) in a new dynamic system
couched in classical type logic that extends Compositional DRT (Muskens
1996). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal
level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague
semantics become available. The idea that plural info states are
semantically necessary (in addition to non-atomic individuals) is
motivated by relative-clause donkey sentences with multiple instances
of singular donkey anaphora that have mixed (weak and strong) readings.
At the same time, allowing for non-atomic individuals in addition to
plural info states enables us to capture the intuitive parallels
between singular and plural (donkey) anaphora, while deriving the
incompatibility between singular (donkey) anaphora and collective
predicates. The system also accounts for empirically unrelated
phenomena, e.g. the uniqueness effects associated with singular
(donkey) anaphora discussed in Kadmon (1990) and Heim (1990) among
others.
Here are some types of donkey sentences that are analyzed in this
paper; many of the examples are (based on examples) from the previous
literature -- see the paper for their sources.
1. Everyu person who buys au' book on amazon.com and has au'' credit card uses itu'' to pay for itu'. (mixed weak & strong donkey sentences)
2. #Everyu farmer who owns au'donkey gathers itu' around the fire at night. (singular donkey anaphora and collective predicates)
3. Everyu parent who gives au' balloon to twou'' boys expects themu'' to end up fighting (each other) for itu'. (multiple singular and plural donkey anaphora and collective predicates)
4. Everybodyu who bought twou' sage plants here bought sevenu'' others along with themu'. (plural sage plant examples)
5. Mostu house-elves who fall in love with au' witch buy heru' anu'' alligator purse. (proportions)
6. There is au doctor in London and heu is Welsh. (uniqueness effects in non-quantificational contexts)
7. Everyu man who has au' son wills himu' all his money. (uniqueness effects and donkey anaphora)
8. Nou man who had au' credit card failed to use itu'. (strong donkey readings with no)
9. Everyu person who had au' dime in his pocket refused to put itu' in the meter. (strong readings for 'dime' examples with nuclear scope negation)
10. Everyu company that hired au' Moldavian man, but nou'' company that hired au' Transylvanian man promoted himu'
within two weeks of hiring. (mixed weak & strong donkey sentences with a single donkey pronoun)
11. Everyu''' man who introduced au friend to meu' thought weu+u'u'' had something in common. (plural donkey anaphora with split antecedents)
12. Everyu linguist who works on au' difficult problem is interested to read mostu'' papers that were written about itu'. (donkey anaphora and 'exceptional wide scope')