Donkey Sentences 763 creating its institutions of laws, religion, and learning. many uneducated speakers to restructure their plural, It was the establishment of viceroyalties, convents so that instead of the expected cotas ‘coasts’, with -s and a cathedral, two universities – the most notable denoting plurality, they have created a new plural being Santo Toma´s de Aquino – and the flourishing of with -se,asinco´ tase. arts and literature during the 16th and early 17th Dominican syntax tends to prepose pronouns in century that earned Hispaniola the title of ‘Athena interrogative questions. As an alternative to the stan- of the New World.’ The Spanish language permeated dard que´ quieres tu´ ? ‘what do you want?’, carrying an those institutions from which it spread, making obligatory, postverbal tu´ ‘you’, speakers say que´ tu´ Hispaniola the cradle of the Spanish spoken in the quieres?. The latter sentence further shows retention Americas. of pronouns, which most dialects may omit. Fre- Unlike the Spanish of Peru and Mexico, which quently found in Dominican is the repetition of dou- co-existed with native Amerindian languages, ble negatives for emphatic purposes, arguably of Dominican Spanish received little influence from the Haitian creole descent. In responding to ‘who did decimated Tainos, whose Arawak-based language that?’, many speakers will reply with a yo no se´ no disappeared, leaving a few recognizable words, such ‘I don’t know, no’. as maı´z ‘maize’ and barbacoa ‘barbecue’. The 17th Notwithstanding the numerous changes to its century saw the French challenge Spain’s hegemony grammatical system, and the continuous contact by occupying the western side of the island, which with the English of a large immigrant population they called Saint Domingue and later became the residing in the United States, Dominican Spanish has Republic of Haiti. Spain continued ruling the eastern remained faithful to its Hispanic heritage. There part under the name of Santo Domingo, changed exists a regulated normative linguistic system, taught subsequently to Dominican Republic by the indepen- in schools and reproduced by the mass media and dence movement, reserving Santo Domingo for the literary works, that eight million speakers aspire to main city. Both powers were deeply engaged in the learn and imitate. Its mastery, along with its own slave trade, which brought Spanish into contact with Dominicanness, have engendered the likes of the a variety of African languages. Dominican Spanish humanist Pedro Henrı´quez Uren˜ a, and the short- also inherited many words and a handful of phonetic story writer Juan Bosch, who have come to occupy a and morphological traits that are attributable to place of distinction in Hispanic letters. African influence. Like other dialects, Dominican Spanish transforms syllable-final /r/ and /l/ and word-final /n/ of mar See also: Pidgins and Creoles: Overview; Spanish. ‘sea’, falta ‘fault’, and sin ‘without’ into [l], [r], and [N] respectively, so that they are pronounced as mal, far, and sing. Typical to the northern Cibao region, Bibliography and not found elsewhere in the Hispanic world, is the Bosch J (1991). De Cristo´ bal Colo´ n a Fidel Castro: el mutation of final /r/, /l/ into the [i] sound. Mar and Caribe, frontera imperial. Santo Domingo: Corripio. falta are pronounced as mai and faita, both sounding Enciclopedia ilustrada de la Repu´ blica Dominicana like my and fight. Final /s/ also undergoes alterations (11 vols) (2003). Santo Domingo: Eduprogreso. ranging from the aspiration noticeable in costa Henrı´quez Uren˜ a P (1945). Literary currents in Hispanic ‘coast’, rendered as cohta, with a sound similar to America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. the h in hot, to total elimination, producing in popu- Lipski J M (1994). Latin American Spanish. London/New lar speech cota, for the word above. This loss has led York: Longman. Donkey Sentences P A M Seuren, Max Planck Institute for sentences is to assign them a structure suitable for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands logical calculus – that is, the formal derivation of ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. entailments. Some variety of the language of predi- cate calculus (LPC) is normally used for logical translations. The problem of ‘donkey sentences’ occupies a promi- In LPC, a term in a proposition that has a truth nent place in the logical analysis of natural lan- value must either be an expression referring to an guage sentences. The purpose of logical analysis of individual (or a set of individuals) that actually exists 764 Donkey Sentences or be a bound variable. Modern predicate calculus is we now call bound variable pronouns, as in (2), and essentially extensional: truth values are computed on having stated that these may never take as ante- the presumption that term referents actually exist, so cedent a constituent of the same clause (‘propositio that it allows in all cases for substitution of coexten- categorica’), he presented (1) as an apparent counter- sional constituents salva veritate. Intensional or vir- example, since the pronoun illum takes as antecedent tual objects – objects that have merely been thought asinum, which stands under the same verb (videt) up but that lack actual existence – have no place in and is thus in the same clause. modern logic, just as they have no place in Quine’s (2) All boys expected that the dog would bite them. ‘desert landscape’ ontology, which has gained curren- cy in large sections of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. That His answer was that the antecedent of illum, i.e., being so, modern logic has no choice but to posit that asinum, is not a main constituent of the same clause any argument term of a predicate in a proposition but a constituent of a subordinate predication, i.e., that has a truth value either refers to an actually habens asinum (‘owning a donkey’). existing object or is a bound variable ranging over Geach (1962) discussed the same problem: how to such objects. account for the antecedent relation when the anteced- Since in natural language one often encounters ent occurs in a relative clause contained in a complex expressions that have the appearance of being refer- predicate. It stands to reason, he said (1962: 117), to ring argument terms but in actual fact fail to refer – treat man who owns a donkey in the sentences (3a) such as the famous sentence in Bertrand Russell’s and (3b), which he considered contradictories, as a (1905) article The present king of France is bald – complex predicate ‘‘replaceable by the single word Quine (1960) started a ‘‘program of elimination of ‘donkey-owner’.’’ But if we did that, (3a) and (3b) particulars’’ aimed at reformulating natural lan- ‘‘become unintelligible ... because ‘it’ is deprived of guage sentences exclusively in terms of the quantifi- an antecedent’’: cational language of modern predicate calculus, (3a) Any man who owns a donkey beats it. without any referring terms. Thus, for Quine and (3b) Some man who owns a donkey does not large sections of the logical community, LPC bans beat it. all definite terms and allows only for variables in argument positions. A solution could conceivably be found in reword- This, however, will not do for natural language, ing these sentences as (4a) and (4b) (1962: 117): which has sentences that express purely extensional (4a) Any man who owns a donkey, owns a donkey propositions and yet contain terms that neither refer and beats it. to an actually existing object nor allow for an analysis (4b) Some man who owns a donkey owns a donkey as bound variable. These are the so-called donkey and does not beat it. sentences. The fact that natural language resists anal- Yet, he says, whereas (3a) and (3b) are contradicto- ysis in terms of LPC constitutes the problem posed by ries, at least according to native speakers’ intuitions, the donkey sentences. (4a) and (4b) are not (1962: 118): The currency of the term ‘donkey sentences’ origi- nates with the British philosopher Peter Geach, whose [F]or both would be true if each donkey-owner had two discussion of certain sentences, all about donkeys, donkeys and beat only one of them. Medieval logicians awakened the interest of modern logicians (Geach, would apparently have accepted the alleged equiva- 1962). Geach did not mention – apart from a token lences; for they argued that a pair such as [(3a)] and reference (1962: 116) to ‘‘another sort of medieval [(3b)] could both be true ...and were therefore not con- example’’ – that he took his cue from Walter Burleigh tradictories. But plainly [(3a)] and [(3b)], as they would (c.1275–after 1344), who introduced donkey sen- normally be understood, are in fact contradictories; in the case supposed, [(3b)] would be true and [(3a)] false. tences in the context of supposition theory, the medieval equivalent of reference theory. In Burleigh The ‘‘medieval logicians’’ Geach argues against are (1988: 92), written around 1328, one finds this in fact Walter Burleigh, who added the following example: comment to his discussion of (1), thereby denying that (3a) and (3b) are contradictories (1988: 92–93; (1) Omnis homo habens asinum videt illum. translation mine): (‘Every man owning a donkey sees it.’) It follows that the following are compatible: ‘Every man Burleigh’s problem had nothing to do with LPC, owning a donkey sees it’ and ‘Some man owning a which did not yet exist. His problem was of a differ- donkey does not see it’. For assuming that every man ent nature. Having noticed that there exist what owns two donkeys, one of which he sees and one of Donkey Sentences 765 which he does not see, then it is not only true to say (11a) Smith must own a donkey, and he may beat it.