Donkey anaphora: Farmers and bishops

This chapter reviews a set of empirical problems faced by formal semantics frameworks that rely on classical static logic in the analysis of pronoun interpretation. The phenomena discussed challenge the idea that the natural language notions of quantifier scope, binding, coreference, covariation, and their compositional interaction match the corresponding notions and their compositional interaction in classical logic. Traditionally, the solutions to these empirical problems are taken to fall into two classes: dynamic accounts and E-type approaches. The chapter discusses these two classes of solutions, and concludes by noting that the most recent approaches to donkey anaphora and related phenomena cannot be neatly classified as belonging to only one side of this divide.