Talk:Donkey sentence

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April 2008[edit]

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

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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Unambiguous semantics?[edit]

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)[reply]