Indefinite Donkeys on Islands

In this paper I present a theory of indefinites which captures two of their natural properties: indefinites license donkey anaphora (Geach 1962) and they exhibit ‘specific’ readings in which they appear to scope out of scope islands. In various flavours of dynamic semantics (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Dekker (2004)), these properties can be captured to the detriment of compositionally. Other theories have employed more involved technical machinery like choice functions (Kratzer 1998, von Heusinger 2002), Hamblin-semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or independence friendly logics (Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011) to derive exceptional scope readings, but ignored donkey anaphora. Theories of E-type anaphora, on the other hand, generally do not consider exceptional scope readings (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2001). My own analysis combines insights from dynamic semantics with referential indexing in LF-semantics, resulting in a fully compositional, static system.