 Turning now to difficulties with CDQ, a main difficulty is that it isn’t clear whether the use of the notion of familiarity in the account of conditional donkey sentences can be ultimately upheld. Recall that the idea was that because “it” is a definite NP, and because definite NPs generally are thought to involve some sort of familiarity, the pronoun in the donkey conditional induces a sort of familiarity effect. There are really two distinct problems here. One is that though the pronoun “it” is “syntactically” definite in that the pronoun “it” is thought to be a definite NP, according to CDQ it is “semantically” indefinite in (25), since it expresses an existential quantification (over donkeys owned by Sarah). But then if “it” really is semantically indefinite in (25), why should it induce familiarity effects at all? (Jason Stanley (p.c.) raised this difficulty). One might reply that it is the fact that “it” is “syntactically” definite that triggers the familiarity effects CDQ posits. But familiarity probably is not well enough understood to allow us to assess this response. A second, and perhaps more pressing, difficulty is this. Generally, familiarity has something to do with whether what an expression is being used to talk about is familiar or salient to the audience being addressed. This is vague, of course, but the idea is that if one says “The dog is hungry” to an audience who isn’t even aware of any dog that is around or relevant to the conversation, the remark is somewhat infelicitous. That is because the definite NP “The dog” was used to talk about something not familiar to the audience. Now the question is: is it plausible to claim that this and related phenomena are related to the rather complex effect CDQ claims is induced by the anaphoricness/definiteness of “it” in donkey conditionals? In the latter case, CDQ claims the effect of familiarity is to make the CDQ “it” in the consequent of donkey conditionals quantify over donkeys in the minimal situations introduced by the antecedents of the conditionals (in the case of (25), situations consisting of Sarah and a single donkey she owns). The CDQ can only quantify over “familiar” donkeys—those introduced by the antecedent. One may well wonder whether the effect CDQ posits here can really be seen to be a manifestation of phenomena that have traditionally been explained in terms of familiarity.