{"id":13715,"date":"2020-09-21T05:58:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T09:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=13715"},"modified":"2020-09-20T17:12:01","modified_gmt":"2020-09-20T21:12:01","slug":"colloquium-9-25-yimei-xiang-rutgers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2020\/09\/21\/colloquium-9-25-yimei-xiang-rutgers-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium 9\/25 - Yimei Xiang (Rutgers)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> Yimei Xiang (Rutgers)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>Higher-order readings of <em>wh<\/em>-questions and the disjunction\u0096conjunction asymmetry<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Friday, September 25th, 3:30pm - 5pm<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>In most cases, a <em>wh<\/em>-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective predicates argues that sometimes a <em>wh<\/em>-question must be interpreted with a higher-order reading, in which this question calls for an answer that names a generalized quantifier.<\/p>\n<p>This talk investigates the distribution and the compositional derivation of these higher-order readings. I observe that questions in which the <em>wh<\/em>-complement is singular-marked or numeral-modified can be answered by elided disjunctions but not by conjunctions. I further present two ways to account for this disjunction&#8212;conjunction asymmetry. In the uniform account, these questions admit disjunctions because disjunctions (but not conjunctions) may satisfy the atomicity requirement of singular-marking and the cardinality requirement of numeral-modification. In the reconstruction account, the <em>wh<\/em>-complement is syntactically reconstructed, which gives rise to local uniqueness and yields a contradiction for conjunctive answers.<\/p>\n<p>If time permits, I will also talk about the constraints on what generalized quantifiers may serve as semantic answers to <em>wh<\/em>-questions.<\/p>\n<p>Relevant materials:<\/p>\n<p>Xiang, Yimei. 2020. Higher-order readings of wh-questions. Forthcoming in Natural Language Semantics. https:\/\/ling.auf.net\/lingbuzz\/004859<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Rutgers) Title: Higher-order readings of wh-questions and the disjunction\u0096conjunction asymmetry Time: Friday, September 25th, 3:30pm - 5pm Abstract: In most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13718,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13715\/revisions\/13718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}