Existential and universal readings of pronouns across binary connectives: an experimental investigation
Keny Chatain, Benjamin Spector, Gregorio Nina
February 2024 

Indefinites may co-vary with pronouns they do not c-command. The donkey configuration is the best-studied of these configurations. It is well-known that these configurations give rise to both existential and universal truth-conditions and that they don’t require uniqueness (Heim, 1982). While there is a rich literature on pronoun readings in connection to donkey sentences (Champollion et al., 2017; Chierchia, 1992; Kanazawa, 1994, a.o.), similar questions also arise in simpler configurations without quantifiers, like cross-conjunction anaphora, and cross-disjunction anaphora (i.e. bathroom sentences, Roberts (1987)). In the case of bathroom sentences, it is still an open empirical question whether these sentences receive an existential reading (Elliott, 2020), a universal reading (Krahmer and Muskens, 1995) or both, and whether they require uniqueness (Gotham, 2019). In this paper, we present a series of truth-value judgment tasks aimed at probing the truth-conditions accessed in cross-conjunction and cross-disjunction configurations. We conclude that there is evidence that cross-disjunction sentences are ambiguous between an existential reading and a universal reading and that there is only evidence for existential readings in cross-conjunction sentences. We argue that this pattern is not predicted by any existing approach and discuss possible amendments. While the amendments are successful in predicting the patterns we observe, they rely on arbitrary and unmotivated stipulations. An additional consequence of our results is to show parallels between the readings obtained in donkey (i.e. quantified) sentences and the readings obtained in non-quantified sentences, suggesting a unified approach for both is desirable.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007988 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted to Semantics and Pragmatics
keywords:	pronouns, bathroom-sentences, donkey pronouns, truth-value judgement task, conjunction, disjunction, semantics
Downloaded:	114 times

 

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