Dynamic inquisitive semantics-looking ahead and looking back

Article Linguistics

Focused NPIs in Statements and Questions

Sunwoo Jeong et al.

Summary: Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody like ANY or EVER and minimizers like lift a finger or sleep a wink have specific contextual inferences that aren't present in non-emphatic NPIs. This paper analyzes these cases as focused NPIs and explores the interplay between focus semantics and lexical semantics of NPIs in statements and questions. It proposes a unified account that posits an additive component even, which is activated selectively depending on the presence of focus alternatives and accounts for observed contextual inferences from focused NPIs.

JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS (2023)

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Article Linguistics

Donkey Anaphora in Non-Monotonic Environments

Milica Deni et al.

Summary: This study provides novel experimental data on the interpretation of donkey anaphora in sentences with non-monotonic quantifiers. The results show that the existential reading is preferred, but the universal reading is more accessible with the quantifier "all but one" than with "exactly 3".

JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS (2022)

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Article Linguistics

Mandarin wh-conditionals: A dynamic question approach

Haoze Li

Summary: There is a special construction in Mandarin known as a 'wh-conditional', where both the antecedent and consequent clauses are wh-clauses and the wh-expressions must co-refer. The two competing approaches to shed light on wh-conditionals are the indefinite approach and the question-categorial approach. Both approaches face challenges but have unique advantages, and the goal is to devise an alternative approach that combines insights from both while avoiding their shortcomings.

NATURAL LANGUAGE SEMANTICS (2021)

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Article Linguistics

A hybrid categorial approach to question composition

Yimei Xiang

Summary: This paper revisits two fundamental issues in question semantics and proposes a novel hybrid categorial approach to compose questions, overcoming some problems with traditional methods.

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY (2021)

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Article Linguistics