Russellian Treatments of Anaphora

Several years ago Gareth Evans got inspiration from the Russellian account of definite descriptions to advance the first cogent semantic analysis of anaphora and, in particular, of the so-called “donkey” anaphora. Later Stephen Neale proposed a substantial improvement of Evans’ theory. According to the Evans-Neale view, donkey pronouns go proxy for Russellian definite descriptions. The main concern of this paper is to explore, given this Russellian background, the recovery procedures of pronominal content for sentences where such pronouns are embedded in. In the course of doing so, we work out a functional conception of donkey anaphora grounded in the generalized quantifiers (GQ) approach. According to that conception, such pronouns denote choice functions satisfying a certain parametric condition provided by the context.