Syntax and Semantics of Questions

Karttunen, Lauri

doi:10.1002/9780470758335.ch16

Cited by 183 publications

(288 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This pattern of contrasts can be found in Chinese, Tsou, and Squliq Atayal. It is causal how vs. the genuine why in Chinese, as in (15) Hamblin (1973) and Karttunen (1977), we take a question operator to represent a combination of existential quantification and a speech act of eliciting information concerning the cause event. This semantics-pragmatics split opens the possibility of changing the speech act to denial without affecting the basic existential construal.…”

Section: Answermentioning

confidence: 99%

Left periphery and how-why alternations

Tsai

2008

J East Asian Linguist

124

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This article concerns the ''topography'' of the Left Periphery, in particular, the syntactic distribution of how-questions across languages and their corresponding semantic interpretations. Causal wh and reason wh are analyzed as sentential operators in the left periphery, which scope over the entire IP and take the corresponding event/state as their complements. By contrast, manner and instrumental wh's are both analyzed as vP-modifiers, which translate into restrictive predicates of the underlying event argument associated with the peripheral area of vP. These wh-expressions differ dramatically with respect to their behavior towards locality principles. On the one hand, only instrumental wh, but not manner wh, may escape from strong island effects and weak intervention effects. On the other, they both observe strong intervention effects, triggered by negation and A-not-A questions. It is suggested that this apparent paradox can be solved by a generalized version of Relativized Minimality proposed in Rizzi (Structures and beyond. The cartography of syntactic structures. Oxford University Press, New York, 2004).

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Section: Answermentioning

confidence: 99%

Left periphery and how-why alternations

Tsai

2008

J East Asian Linguist

124

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“…Concerning the concrete technical implementation of this idea, it is in principle compatible with a variety of theories about question denotations, be it the one of Karttunen (1977), according to which a question denotes the set of propositions that are its true answers, or the partition-semantics of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). Let us adopt the latter for concreteness sake, such that the denotation of the consequent question in (87) comes out as the partition of worlds in (92a).…”

Section: Other Consequent Speech Actsmentioning

confidence: 98%

A unified analysis of conditionals as topics

Ebert

Hinterwimmer

2014

Linguist and Philos

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We bring out syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents [normal indicative conditionals (NCs) and biscuit conditionals (BCs)] and two types of left dislocation constructions in German (German left dislocation and hanging topic left dislocation), which mark two types of topicality (aboutness topicality and relevance topicality). On the basis of these similarities we argue that (the antecedent if -clauses of) NCs and BCs are aboutness topics and relevance topics, respectively. Our analysis extends the approach to aboutness topicality of Endriss (Quantificational topics. A scopal treatment of exceptional wide scope phenomena, 2009) to relevance topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution of left-dislocated DPs and applies it to an analysis of conditionals as (maximal) pluralities of possible worlds. We show how this uniform approach to the interpretation of topicality accounts for the nominal left dislocation constructions as well as for the semantic and pragmatic effects observed in connection with the two types of conditionals. We furthermore discuss the potential of our proposal to deal with subjunctive biscuit conditionals, if -clauses modifying speech acts different from assertions, conditionals with right-dislocated if -clauses, and nested conditionals.

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“…Mayr (2014) imposes a condition on wh-question interpretation, namely, that the disjunction of the alternatives in the Hamblin denotation of a wh-question must be equivalent to the resulting proposition when a wh-phrase is interpreted as an existential quantifier in its surface scope position. The latter can be seen as the existential presupposition of wh-questions (Karttunen 1977;Dayal 1996). In other words, this condition on wh-questions requires that the disjunction of the Hamblin alternatives return the existential presupposition.…”

Section: The Non-additivity Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention

Law

2016

Linguist and Philos

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In Beck (Nat Lang Seman 14:1-56, 2006), focus intervention is used as an argument for reducing Hamblin's (Found Lang 10:41-53, 1973) semantics for questions to Rooth's (Association with focus. Ph.D. Thesis, 1985) focus semantics. Drawing on novel empirical evidence from Mandarin and English, we argue that this reduction is unwarranted. Maintaining both Hamblin's original semantics and Rooth's focus semantics not only allows for a more adequate account for focus intervention in questions, but also correctly predicts that focus intervention is a very general phenomenon caused by interaction of alternatives in different dimensions.

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Syntax and Semantics of Questions

Abstract: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICSOF QUESTIONS* 0. This paper presents a novel account of the syntax and semantics of questions, making use of the framework for linguistic description developed by Richard Montague (1974). Certain features of the proposal are based on work by N.

Cited by 183 publications

References 7 publications

Left periphery and how-why alternations

Left periphery and how-why alternations

A unified analysis of conditionals as topics

Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention

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