Donkey sentence
Sentence containing a pronoun with clear meaning but unclear syntactic role / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning (it is semantically bound) but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists.[lower-alpha 1] Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.[lower-alpha 2]
Barker and Shan define a donkey pronoun as "a pronoun that lies outside the restrictor of a quantifier or the if-clause of a conditional, yet covaries with some quantificational element inside it, usually an indefinite."[3] The pronoun in question is sometimes termed a donkey pronoun or donkey anaphora.
The following sentences are examples of donkey sentences.
- "Omne homo habens asinum videt illum." ("Every man who owns a donkey sees it") — Walter Burley (1328), De puritate artis logicae tractatus longior[4][5]
- "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it."[6]
- "Every police officer who arrested a murderer insulted him."