Thursday 26 January 2012

Donkey Anaphora and the King(s) of France

An end-of-the-semester gift from one of my semantics students:


A t-shirt for a (as yet fictitious?) band. Started as an in-class joke which arose from the juxtaposition of two topics:

(1) presupposition failure in sentences like "The king of France is bald", and
(2) issues involving the binding of pronouns in sentences like "Every farmer who owns a donkeyi beats iti."