Donkey Pronoun

A donkey pronoun is a pronoun that is bound in semantics but not syntax. 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 terms d-type or e-type pronoun are also used, mutually exclusively, dependent on theoretical approach to interpretation. A sentence containing a donkey pronoun is sometimes called a donkey sentence.

The term donkey pronoun was coined from a counterexample provided by Peter Geach (1962) 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. The original donkey sentence is as follows.

• Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. — Peter Geach, Reference and Generality

This sentence is significant because it represents 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. Additionally, 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 are other features of the sentence that require careful consideration for adequate description. (Notice, however, how reading "each" in place of "every" simplifies the formal analysis.)

The donkey pronoun in the example sentence is the word it.

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, their semantics are unambiguous. It is precisely this that makes them interesting. The difficulty is with explaining how syntactic elements give rise to the semantic result and in a way that generalizes consistently with all other language use. Then, for example, we could program a computer to accurately translate natural language forms into logical form. 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.