This squib provides an account of a contrast between whether and if in English, manifested in the contrast between the grammaticality of I don’t know whether or not Pat will arrive and the ...ungrammaticality of *I don’t know if or not Pat will arrive. I argue that this contrast can be explained if we assume that whether can pied-pipe, but there is no pied-piping in if-questions. Strikingly, once the pied-piping parse for whether is eliminated, it behaves like if. Then I show that this contrast exists crosslinguistically: Polish alternative questions behave like whether-questions because pied-piping is possible, and Bengali alternative questions behave like if-questions because pied-piping is not possible.
Abstract
Like many other languages, in Finnish the alternative conjunction vai ('or') can be used in a turn-final position without the presence of an (explicit) alternative. This article discusses ...the contribution of turn-final vai 'or' in requests for confirmation. It argues that there are two main contexts of use. The forward-looking vai-turn seeks confirmation for something that is not based on the previous talk. In this case, vai marks the content of the question as merely one possible alternative. In backward-looking use, the vai-turn offers an interpretation of something that was implied in the previous talk and typically contrasts with a previously held, alternative assumption. The former type enables a (dis)confirmation with elaboration, whereas the latter type makes relevant a (dis)confirmation with minimal specification/explanation. The study contributes to the cross-linguistic research on turn-final particles and specifically, the particle 'or'.
A central question in the study of presuppositions is how a presupposition trigger contributes to the meaning of a complex expression containing it. Two competing answers are found in the literature ...on quantificational expressions. According to the first, a quantificational expression presupposes that every member of its domain satisfies the presuppositions triggered in its scope, and according to the second, a quantificational expression presupposes that at least one member of its domain satisfies the presuppositions triggered in its scope. The former view implies that an interrogative clause, a kind of quantificational expression, presupposes all of its possible answers’ presuppositions, whereas the latter view implies that an interrogative clause presupposes that the presuppositions of at least one of is possible answers are satisfied. This paper contributes to the debate by showing that ‘alternative’ interrogatives, formed with
or
, project presuppositions in the same, distinctive manner that other disjunctive constructions do: generally, universally. A theory that treats disjunctive words as restricted variables, bindable by various quantificational operators, is extended to account for the presuppositions of ‘alternative’ interrogatives, disjoined declaratives, and disjoined conditional antecedents in a uniform manner. The paper then explores some ways to reconcile the proposal with two special cases where interrogatives have been claimed to have weaker presuppositions: (1) constituent interrogatives in presupposition-weakening contexts, and (2) polar interrogatives containing bias-inducing scalar particles like
even
.
This paper provides a prosodic, syntactic and semantic analysis of prosodic F-effects in interrogatives. It is argued that alternative questions involve a question-related F-feature on the ...alternatives, and that the sentence stress on the wh-word in echo questions is due to a wh-word inherent F-feature. These cases, like Japanese wh-in situ questions, show a full prosodic F-effect (attraction of sentence stress). German and English wh-questions show a reduced prosodic F-effect on the wh-phrase in situ and no prosodic F-effect on moved wh-phrases (in single-wh-questions). Surprisingly, the wh-phrase in situ shows evidence of percolation of F to the wh-phrase. These effects are related to a postulated relation of l-agreement that connects the Q-marker to one or more wh-phrases. Evidence for the agreement relation is that it can be blocked by an intervening wh-phrase construed with another Q-marker, with striking prosodic consequences. An account at the syntax–semantic interface is suggested, in which F can be interpreted relative to the Q-marker and replaces the feature wh. Semantically, F in interrogatives connects expressions to the interrogative interpretation. Absence of F on moving wh-phrases (but not on others) provides evidence that these rely on a different mechanism of construal with the Q-marker.
We distinguish between two types of interrogative particles, (regular) question particles and polar question particles. The first, canonically exemplified by Japanese
-ka
, occurs in all ...interrogatives, in matrix as well as embedded contexts. The second, the object of the present study, is exemplified by the Hindi-Urdu particle
kya:
. Polar
kya:
occurs in polar questions but not in wh questions, and it occurs optionally in matrix questions but only in a restricted way in embedded questions. We analyze this particle as presupposing that its prejacent denotes a singleton propositional set and as partitioning the questioned proposition into two parts that can be characterized as at-issue and not at-issue. These two aspects of its meaning are shown to capture several facets of the behavior of the polar question particle
kya:
that have not previously been analyzed or even systematically described. The paper also touches upon well-known phenomena, such as interrogative selection and alternative questions, but from a new perspective and opens up a way of looking at interrogative particles in other languages that do not seem to neatly fit the mold of regular question particles.
This paper gives an account of the differences between polar and alternative questions, as well as an account of the division of labor between compositional semantics and pragmatics in interpreting ...these types of questions. Alternative questions involve a strong exhaustivity presupposition for the mentioned alternatives. We derive this compositionally from the meaning of the final falling tone and its interaction with the pragmatics of questioning in discourse. Alternative questions are exhaustive in two ways: they exhaust the space of epistemic possibilities, as well as the space of discourse possibilities (the Question Under Discussion). In contrast, we propose that polar questions are the opposite: they present just one alternative that is necessarily non-exhaustive. The account explains a range of response patterns to alternative and polar questions, as well as differences and similarities between the two types of questions.
Alternative questions differ prosodically from identically worded disjunctive yes/no questions in their accentual characteristics and their final pitch contour. Alternative questions are canonically ...pronounced with a final fall and with pitch accents on all disjuncts, while disjunctive yes/no questions are canonically pronounced with a final rise and generally without pitch accents on every disjunct. This article presents an experiment investigating the importance of these prosodic features in disambiguation. The experiment shows that the final contour is the most informative prosodic feature. Accentual characteristics also play a significant role, but, contrary to what is often assumed in the literature, cannot force an alternative question interpretation or a yes/no question interpretation on their own. Several theories of disjunctive questions are discussed in the light of these experimental results.
In languages like English, disjunctive questions have an alternative (ALT) reading and a yes /no (YN) reading. The two readings behave differently; there are environments in which one reading ...disappears and the other one survives. In this article, examining novel Croatian data, I investigate the environments where the YN reading disappears. Such environments suggest that the two readings of disjunctive questions differ in the size of the disjuncts: ALT readings arise when the disjoint constituents are bigger than the TP, while YN readings arise from disjunctions of phrases as big as the surface string suggests and not bigger than the TP.
This paper provides a compositional semantics for the Japanese Q-particle ka that properly accounts for its use in questions, indefinites and disjunctions in a unified fashion. Adopting the two-tier ...alternative semantics (Rooth 1985; Beck 2006), I will propose that the role of the ka-particle is always to project a set of alternatives introduced by the wh-item in the alternative-semantic dimension to the ordinary-semantic dimension (Kotek 2014). Unlike in previous analyses, I will adopt this semantics for the Q-particle not only for its clause-final use, but also for clause-internal use. Combining this with the cross-categorial existential closure, the analysis accounts for how the interpretation of a ka-ending phrase is conditioned by its syntactic environments. This mechanism enables an account of the previously unexplained parallelism between wh+ka and ka-disjunctions in their variability in interpretations.
Knowing whether A or B Aloni, Maria; Égré, Paul; de Jager, Tikitu
Synthese (Dordrecht),
09/2013, Volume:
190, Issue:
14
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The paper examines the logic and semantics of knowledge attributions of the form "s knows whether A or B". We analyze these constructions in an epistemic logic with alternative questions, and propose ...an account of the context-sensitivity of the corresponding sentences and of their presuppositions.
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