Donkey Anaphora in French Sign Language : A Progress Report

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. John owns a donkey. He beats it). Proponents of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982) revise quantification so as to allow an existential quantifier to bind a pronoun which is not within its syntactic scope which yields a formal link between the quantifier and the pronoun, as is illustrated in (1)a. By contrast, proponents of the E-type approach (Evans 1980, Heim 1990, Elbourne 2005) take the pronoun to go proxy for a definite description such as the donkey that he has, with no formal link between the pronoun and its antecedent, as shown in (1)b (where it [donkey that he has] is interpreted as a description; on a strict syntactic construal of this analysis, the pronoun would have to be interpreted as a definite determiner).