Syntax Semantics And Acquisition Of Multiple Interrogatives

Multiple interrogatives, questions with multiple wh-phrases (e.g. Who bought what?), have long presented analytical challenges for linguistic theory. This monograph presents a new theoretical and experimental study of this construction. The theoretical findings concern the interaction between superiority effects, subject-auxiliary inversion, and the distribution of pair-list and single-pair readings cross-linguistically. The author examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing (i.e. clausal ellipsis), presenting new arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. The author also reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam. The results suggest a correlation between the acquisition of multiple interrogatives and the acquisition of contrastive focus, which has been independently motivated in the syntactic literature. The monograph will be of interest to linguists concerned with syntax, semantics, and language acquisition, as well as readers who are interested in a comprehensive theory of language in general.

Examines multiple interrogatives under sluicing and presenting various arguments for the deletion analysis of sluicing. In this title, the author reports the results of several experimental studies on how children acquire the language-specific properties of multiple interrogatives in English, Russian, and Malayalam.

Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called `weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.

This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.

This volume contains writings focusing on semantic phenomena and their interpretation in the analysis of the language of a learner. The variety of phenomena that are addressed is substantial: temporal aspect and tense, specificity, quantification, scope, finiteness, focus structure, and focus particles. These phenomena are investigated is many languages. The volume creates a theoretical as well as an empirical bridge between semantic research on the one hand and psycholinguistic acquisition studies on the other.

Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface starts by analyzing the interpretation of interrogative phrases in single and multiple constituent questions, including their interpretation under adverbs of quantification. The results are then put to work in a novel approach to some of the constraints on dependencies between fronted interrogative phrases and the associated gaps: superiority, weak crossover, as well as the so-called weak islands' (the WH-island, the negative island and the Factive Island). It is argued that the possibility of fronting an interrogative phrase out of these configurations is determined by a semantic/pragmatic condition on questions, which requires them to be answerable. The analysis is worked out principally on Romanian, a language which allows multiple wh-fronting. The results are then extended to English. Audience: Researchers and students in syntax, semantics and their interface, as well as linguists studying the relation between the acceptability of sentences and the larger discourse context.

This dissertation motivates a new syntax and semantics for simplex and multiple wh-questions, concentrating on English and German data. The proposed theory combines Cable's (2007; 2010) Q-based syntax for wh-movement and pied-piping with a new and simple semantics that combines ingredients familiar from the literature in a novel way. I model the pair-list reading of the question as denoting a family of questions (Roberts, 1996; Hagstrom, 1998; Krifka, 2001; Buring, 2003; Fox, 2012; Nicolae, 2013, a.o.), and derive the pair-list and single-pair readings of the question from minimally different LFs. This theory naturally fits with existing analyses of the presuppositions of questions and with Beck's (2006) theory of focus intervention effects. The proposed syntax-semantics leads to a new descriptive generalization for focus intervention effects. I present novel data that the previously assumed strict correlation between intervention and superiority in English (Pesetsky, 2000) is incorrect. Instead, intervention occurs whenever the relation between a wh-word and its associated Q-particle is disrupted at LF. This happens in superiority-violating questions, inside overt and covert pied-piping constituents, and in superiority-obeying questions whenever covert wh-movement is restricted to a position below an intervener. Furthermore, intervention can be avoided in superiority-violating questions if the in-situ wh is given wide scope above an intervener through non-interrogative movement. Finally, I present arguments from offline judgments as well as from online sentence processing that in-situ wh-phrases in English superiority-obeying questions undergo covert movement, but in-situ wh-phrases in superiority-violating questions are truly in-situ at LF. I furthermore argue that the covert movement step of the in-situ wh should be modeled as covert scrambling instead of the unbounded movement to the interrogative complementizer that is traditionally assumed. Movement targets the first position where a wh is interpretable, and is only extended in extraordinary cases, for example in order to avoid a structure that would be an intervention effect, or in order to allow for ellipsis resolution. This makes the behavior of English parallel to that of German. I argue that this is advantageous for the acquisition of questions and intervention, and helps to account for our understanding of the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions.

This Handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis phenomena, whereby the meaning of an utterance is richer than would be expected based solely on its linguistic form. Natural language abounds in these apparently incomplete expressions, such as I laughed but Ed didn't, in which the final portion of the sentence, the verb 'laugh', remains unpronounced but is still understood. The range of phenomena involved raise general and fundamental questions about the workings of grammar, but also constitute a treasure trove of fine-grained points of inter- and intralinguistic variation. The volume is divided into four parts. In the first, authors examine the role that ellipsis plays and how it is analysed in different theoretical frameworks and linguistic subdisciplines, such as HPSG, construction grammar, inquisitive semantics, and computational linguistics. Chapters in the second part highlight the usefulness of ellipsis as a diagnostic tool for other linguistic phenomena including movement and islands and codeswitching, while part III focuses instead on the types of elliptical constructions found in natural language, such as sluicing, gapping, and null complement anaphora. Finally, the last part of the book contains case studies that investigate elliptical phenomena in a wide variety of languages, including Dutch, Japanese, Persian, and Finnish Sign Language.