Talk:Donkey sentence

April 2008
Why is this separate from donkey pronoun if treatment is to be encyclopedic? --Wetman (talk) 21:33, 22 April 2008 (UTC)


 * See reply at Talk:Donkey pronoun. The donkey sentence launched a lot of work in semantics of natural language, perhaps most notably discourse representation theory. You may want to upgrade the importance, once there's enough info in the article for that to be clear. Philosophers seem to be doing most of the work, linguists seem to value it more highly than philosophers though. That's just my impression from the literature, but I wouldn't defend it very hard. Alastair Haines (talk) 03:13, 23 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Feel free to adjust the ratings any way you want. Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 03:50, 23 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you, your Holiness. ;) I'm content to do the work of writing up the sources. Methinks if I do a passing fair job of it, the sources will speak for themselves. Thanks for dropping by! :) Alastair Haines (talk) 21:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Where the page says:

"Imagine a situation where there is a farmer owning a donkey and a pig, and not beating any of them. The formula will be true in that situation, because for each farmer we need to find at least one object that either is not a donkey owned by this farmer, or is beaten by the farmer. Hence, if this object denotes the pig, the sentence will be true in that situation." 

I find this confusing. Would it be clearer to say:

"Imagine a situation where there is a farmer owning a donkey and a pig, and not beating any of them. The formula will be made true in that situation by the pig (because it is not a donkey)." ? 

I'm not actually doing this edit because I am total newbie here!!CathyLegg (talk) 12:18, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

p.s. What is so bad about having to use an existential quantifier sometimes and a universal at other times? In some sense this is 'inconsistent', but a pretty weak sense I would have thought. CathyLegg (talk) 12:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

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Unambiguous semantics?
The article claimed donkey sentences "have well-defined truth conditions, and their semantics are unambiguous". These claims don't seem to be supported by a source, and I don't think they are quite true. "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it" — What if a farmer owns multiple donkeys – does the sentence mean he beats all of them? What if two or more farmers share ownership of a donkey – does the sentence mean all of the farmers beat the donkey? I'd say the answer to both questions is probably yes in most contexts, but it's not unambiguous. I removed the claims. If someone finds a source supporting the claims, we can reinstate them. Chrisahn (talk) 17:39, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

"A pronoun with clear meaning"
I don't agree that the pronouns being referred to have a clear meaning. Even after being alerted that something is odd about the sentence, I still don't know what "Every police officer who arrested a murderer insulted him" is supposed to mean. (The same murderer is repeatedly arrested, plus insulted each time? A defense lawyer gets insulted in court by arresting officers in each of several cases? Many murderers were each insulted upon arrest?)

I also disagree that the sentences are grammatically correct. They are grammatically not incorrect, which (especially in this case) is not the same thing. It seems to me that the only reason these sentences were ever identified and discussed is that they demonstrate a situation in which the difference between "correct" and "not incorrect" is significant. TooManyFingers (talk) 21:55, 22 June 2024 (UTC)


 * You are correct that the sentences are ambiguous. Whoever wrote the "clear meaning" bit likely intended that the sentence does have an easily accessible interpretation on which "it" acts as a donkey pronoun, even if it has other interpretations too. That's enough for it to be a puzzle, since the mere existence of a donkey anaphora interpretation is not predicted by theories that otherwise seem to get things right. I have rephrased that part of the article in the hopes that it will be clearer.


 * As for your second comment, I've added a link to grammaticality to make it clearer what linguists mean when they say something is(n't) grammatical. If you disagree with that way of thinking about things, there's certainly more to be said so I would recommend asking on Reddit or Stack Exchange (per WP:NOTFORUM), but I hope this at least makes the article somewhat clearer.


 * Also, thanks a whole bunch for commenting. I'm not the main author of this particular article, but I've written others like it and I'm never quite sure what's clear and what isn't to someone who doesn't spend their life working on these topics. So comments like this are useful. Botterweg14  (talk)  00:04, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * That's a good point about grammatical vs. not, and I think I understand. But I think it's obvious that the sentences all share the same defect, and I think it might be nice as part of the article to make it clear what that defect is, even though it's outside the scope of grammar. TooManyFingers (talk) 02:36, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * (I mean something like how they succeed as grammar but fail as communication.) TooManyFingers (talk) 02:41, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

False claim implied
The article says "In order to explain how speakers are able to understand them, ..."

I contend that people (including speakers) are NOT able to understand these sentences in the way that they are constructed, and there is no reference material showing that people do reliably understand them. I'm sure speakers do produce the sentences, but we know that speakers can produce incorrect or ambiguous sentences from time to time.

Rather than simply being grammatical, these sentences may serve to demonstrate that English grammar is defective because it allows them.

So please provide references showing that donkey sentences are universally understood, or remove the claims. TooManyFingers (talk) 06:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Not sure what that's about. Every normal native speaker can understand what "If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it" means.  Some of the other sentences may sound a little funny, but their intended meaning is also clear (if some people get tripped up on certain examples, it would be due to their general complexity, not their donkeyness).  Consult also WP:BLUE. AnonMoos (talk) 01:34, 30 June 2024 (UTC)