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Crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives

Crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives. Neal Whitman nwhitman@ameritech.net COULD, May 12, 2007. Asking more than one thing at once. Multiple wh Coordinated wh Coordination with sluicing. Multiple wh. Whom did you see when? Who sat where?. Coordinated wh.

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Crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives

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  1. Crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives Neal Whitman nwhitman@ameritech.net COULD, May 12, 2007

  2. Asking more than one thing at once • Multiple wh • Coordinated wh • Coordination with sluicing

  3. Multiplewh Whom did you see when? Who sat where?

  4. Coordinated wh When and where were you born? Who or what did this?

  5. Coordination with sluicing Who did this, and why? Where did he go, and when?

  6. Wh complements • Multiple wh: Who read what? • Coordinated wh: *Who and what read? • Sluicing:*Who read, and what?

  7. Complement and adjunct • Multiple wh: Who saw Elvis where? • Coordinated wh: *Who and where saw Elvis? • Sluicing: Who saw Elvis, and where?

  8. Wh adjuncts • Multiple wh: (?)Where did you see him when? • Coordinated wh: Where and when did you see him? • Sluicing : Where did you see him, and when?

  9. In short...

  10. Who read what? • Single-pair answer: Kim read The Da Vinci Code. • Pair-list answer: Kim read The Da Vinci Code; Robin read Harry Potter; and Sandy read Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.

  11. Who saw Elvis when? #Who killed him when?

  12. Where did you see him when?#Where were you born when?

  13. SP, PL, or both?

  14. Hungarian

  15. Russian

  16. MWh, CWh, and Q-inference SP answers MWh questions’ denotation, by Q-inference PL answers SP answers CWh questions’ denotation

  17. Chinese Czech English (Estonian) German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Japanese Korean Macedonian Russian Spanish (Tagalog) (Vietnamese) Languages surveyed

  18. 24 questions • Who/what 1. Who read what? 2. What did who read? 3. *Who and what read? 4. *What and who read?

  19. 24 questions • Who/where 1. Who saw her where? 2. Where did who see her? 3. *Who and where saw her? 4. *Where and who saw her? 5. Whom did she see where? 6. Where did she see whom? 7. * Whom and where did she see? 8. *Where and whom did she see?

  20. 24 questions • Who/when 1. Who saw her when? 2. When did who see her? 3. *Who and when saw her? 4. *When and who saw her? 5. Whom did she see when? 6. When did she see whom? 7. * Whom and when did she see? 8. *When and whom did she see?

  21. 24 questions • Who/when 1. Where will she sing when? 2. When will she sing where? 3. Where and when will she sing? 4. When and where will she sing?

  22. Chinese III Czech Greek III Hungarian Korean II Macedonian II Russian I, II, III Spanish IV MWh/CWh overlapfor who/what

  23. Chinese I, III Czech Greek II, III Hungarian Korean II Macedonian II Russian II, III Spanish IV MWh/CWh overlapfor who/where or who/when

  24. Chinese I, III Czech English I German I, II Greek III Hebrew II Hungarian Korean II, III MWh/CWh overlapfor where/when

  25. Conclusion • The hypothesis is not supported. • It may be true for some languages, but not for all. • It needs fuller investigation with coordination plus sluicing. • Some languages have SP/PL segregation, but in the opposite direction. • In some languages, SP vs. PL is related to interpretive superiority.

  26. Acknowledgments • Thank you to all the native speaker informants who have provided translations and syntactic and semantic judgments for this project:Ben Chudnovsky, Ilija Doneski, Anna Feldman, Calixto Gonzales, Betya Goykhman, Patti Green, Jirka Hana, Hyeon-Seok Kang, Soyoung Kang, Yusuke Kubota, Sun-Hee Lee, Ilse Lehiste, Dmitry Levinson, Anikó Lipták, Xiaofei Lu, Arantxa Martín-Lozano, Detmar Meurers, Bettina Migge, Mineharu "JJ" Nakayama, Roberto Orci, Panayiotis Pappas, Mike Puchovich, Hongqi Rouzer, Jane Rubin-Kurtzmann, Le Nhan Thanh, Giorgos Tserdanelis, Shravan Vasishth, Amanda Whitman, Ellen Whitman, Philip Whitman, and Niina Zhang.

  27. The Coordinated-Wh Project http://literalmindedlinguistics.com/Coord_Wh/home.html

  28. References Only those reference that were directly cited in this talk are listed here. For a fuller bibliography on coordinated-wh questions, see the website for the Coordinated-Wh Project. Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications (GURT ’84), ed. by D. Schiffrin, 11-43. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kazenin, Konstantin I. (ed.) 2002. On Coordination of WH-Phrases in Russian. Tuebingen. Lipták, Anikó. 2003. Conjoined Questions in Hungarian. Multiple-Wh Fronting, ed. by Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes Grohmann. 141-60. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Philadelphia: Benjamins.

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