{"id":14496,"date":"2022-01-31T05:58:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T10:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=14496"},"modified":"2022-01-31T05:58:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T10:58:00","slug":"colloquium-2-4-linmin-zhang-nyu-shanghai-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2022\/01\/31\/colloquium-2-4-linmin-zhang-nyu-shanghai-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium 2\/4 - Linmin Zhang (NYU Shanghai)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> Linmin Zhang (NYU Shanghai)<br class=\"\"><strong>Title: <\/strong>Post-suppositions and wh-questions: Intervention effects revisited<br class=\"\"><strong>Time: <\/strong>Friday, February 4th, 6:00pm - 7:30pm<br class=\"\"><br class=\"\"><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>In this talk, I investigate a novel, post-supposition-based account for intervention effects of wh-questions, i.e., the degradedness or uninterpretability of certain wh-questions containing focus items (e.g., only) or quantifiers (e.g., exactly 3 girls), as illustrated in (1) (see also Beck 2006, Li and Law 2016) as well as (2) and (3).<\/p>\n<p>(1) Focus intervention in Chinese wh-questions that contain only (zh?y?u)<\/p>\n<p>    a. zh?y?u [Zh?ng-S?n]F d\u00fa-le y?y\u00ecxu\u00e9 sh?.<br clear='none'\/>\n       only Zh?ng-S?n read-PFV semantics book<br clear='none'\/>\n       &#8216;Only Zh?ng S?n read a book (or books) on semantics.&#8217;<br clear='none'\/>\n       [With only (zh?y?u)]<\/p>\n<p>    b. * zh?y?u [Zh?ng-S?n]F d\u00fa-le sh\u00e9nme sh??<br clear='none'\/>\n       only Zh?ng-S?n read-PFV what book<br clear='none'\/>\n       Intended: \u0091what book(s) did only Zh?ng S?n read?\u0092<br clear='none'\/>\n       [only \u0085wh ? degraded]<\/p>\n<p>    c. sh\u00e9nme sh? zh?y?u [Zh?ng-S?n]F d\u00fa-le?<br clear='none'\/>\n       what book only Zh?ng-S?n read-PFV<br clear='none'\/>\n       &#8216;What book(s) did only Zh?ng S?n read?&#8217;<br clear='none'\/>\n       [wh \u0085only ? natural]<\/p>\n<p>    d. Zh?ng-S?n d\u00fa-le sh\u00e9nme sh??<br clear='none'\/>\n       Zh?ng-S?n read-PFV what book<br clear='none'\/>\n       &#8216;What book(s) did Zh?ng S?n read?&#8217;<br clear='none'\/>\n       [Without only: Chinese is a wh-in-situ language]<\/p>\n<p>(2) a. Exactly 3 girls are above 6 feet tall.<br clear='none'\/>\n    b. *How tall are exactly 3 girls?<\/p>\n<p>(3) a. Exactly 3 girls read exactly 5 books.<br clear='none'\/>\n       [? distributive, ? cumulative]<br clear='none'\/>\n    b. How many girls read exactly 5 books?<br clear='none'\/>\n       [? distributive, # cumulative]<br clear='none'\/>\n    c. *How many books did exactly 3 girls read?<\/p>\n<p>To account for these degraded wh-questions, I start with the interpretation of focus items and quantifiers in declarative sentences, examining how they affect the process of semantic composition.  I argue that all these items that create intervention effects in wh-questions are triggers of post-suppositions in declarative sentences (see Brasoveanu 2013), bringing delayed evaluations. On the other hand, I propose that wh-questions (e.g., who did she kiss) are parallel to definite descriptions (e.g., the one she kissed) and also work in a post-suppositional fashion. Specifically, the semantic contribution of wh-words (e.g., who) is twofold: introducing a discourse referent, and then imposing tests of maximality as delayed evaluations. Intervention effects are considered due to an order conflict in semantic derivation, resulting from two distinct sources of post-suppositions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Linmin Zhang (NYU Shanghai)Title: Post-suppositions and wh-questions: Intervention effects revisitedTime: Friday, February 4th, 6:00pm - 7:30pmAbstract: In this talk, I investigate a novel, post-supposition-based account for intervention effects of wh-questions, i.e., the degradedness or uninterpretability of certain wh-questions containing focus items (e.g., only) or quantifiers (e.g., exactly 3 girls), as illustrated in (1) (see [&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-14496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496","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=14496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}