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Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a donkey pronoun or donkey anaphora. Such pronouns or anaphoric expressions may also be called d-type or e-type pronoun, depending on theoretical approach to interpretation. A donkey pronoun is a pronoun that is bound in semantics but not syntax.〔 Emar Maier describes donkey pronouns as "bound but not c-commanded" in a Linguist List (review ) of Paul D. Elbourne's ''Situations and Individuals'' (MIT Press, 2006).〕〔Barker and Shan define a donkey pronoun as "a pronoun that lies outside the restrictor of a quantifier or the antecedent of a conditional, yet covaries with some quantificational element inside it, usually an indefinite." Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan, ('Donkey Anaphora is Simply Binding' ), colloquium presentation, Frankfurt, 2007.〕 Some writers prefer the term "donkey anaphora", since it is the referential aspects and discourse or syntactic context that are of interest to researchers (see anaphora). The following sentences are examples of donkey sentences. *Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. — Peter Geach (1962), ''Reference and Generality'' * Every police officer who arrested a murderer insulted him. Such sentences are significant because they represent a class of well-formed natural-language sentences that defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse the scope of quantification in such sentences.〔David Lewis describes this as his motivation for considering the issue in the introduction to ''Papers in Philosophical Logic'', a collection of reprints of his articles. "There was no satisfactory way to assign relative scopes to quantifier phrases." (CUP, 1998: 2.)〕 Peter Geach's original donkey sentence was a counterexample to Richard Montague's proposal for a generalized formal representation of quantification in natural language. The example was reused by David Lewis (1975), Gareth Evans (1977) and many others, and is still quoted in recent publications. ==Features== Features of the sentence, "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it," require careful consideration for adequate description (though reading "each" in place of "every" does simplify the formal analysis). The donkey pronoun in this case is the word ''it''. The indefinite article 'a' is normally understood as an existential quantifier, but the most natural reading of the donkey sentence requires it to be understood as a nested universal quantifier. There is nothing wrong with donkey sentences: they are grammatically correct, they are well-formed, their syntax is regular. They are also logically meaningful, they have well-defined truth conditions, and their semantics are unambiguous. However, it is difficult to explain how donkey sentences produce their semantic results, and how those results generalize consistently with all other language use. If such an analysis were successful, it might allow a computer program to accurately translate natural language forms into logical form.〔Alistair Knott, ('An Algorithmic Framework for Specifying the Semantics of Discourse Relations', ) ''Computational Intelligence'' 16 (2000).〕 The question is, how are natural language users, apparently effortlessly, agreeing on the meaning of sentences like these? There may be several equivalent ways of describing this process. In fact, Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982) independently proposed very similar accounts in different terminology, which they called discourse representation theory (DRT) and file change semantics (FCS) respectively. In 2007, Adrian Brasoveanu published studies of donkey pronoun analogs in Hindi, and analysis of complex and modal versions of donkey pronouns in English. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Donkey sentence」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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