{"id":17942,"date":"2026-04-13T06:05:55","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T10:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17942"},"modified":"2026-04-13T09:40:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:40:12","slug":"lf-reading-group-4-14-vlad-orlov-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/04\/13\/lf-reading-group-4-14-vlad-orlov-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"LF Reading Group 4\/14 - Vlad Orlov (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><strong>Speaker:<\/strong> Vlad Orlov (MIT)<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Title: <\/strong>Observations on the Existential Uses of Interrogative Pronouns in Russian<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Time: <\/strong>Wednesday, April 14th, 1pm - 2pm<br class=\"\" \/><br clear='none'\/>\n<strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D461<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><strong><strong>Abstract: <\/strong><\/strong>Some of the interrogative pronouns in Russian can be used as indefinites in certain environments, which makes them quexistentials in the terminology of Hengeveld et al. 2023. The interrogative use (Inter<sub>Q<\/sub>) can be disambiguated from the indefinite (Indef<sub>Q<\/sub>) by the obligatory F-marking on the pronoun in the former case:<\/p>\n<div>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(1) Kto prixodil?<br clear='none'\/>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0who.Q came?<br clear='none'\/>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0i) Who<sub>F<\/sub>\u00a0came? (<b>Inter<\/b><sub><b>Q<\/b><\/sub>)<br clear='none'\/>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 ii) Did someone come<sub>F<\/sub>? (<b>Indef<\/b><sub><b>Q<\/b><\/sub>)<\/div>\n<div>Previous research (Yanovich 2005) have treated quexistentials as Hamblin pronouns, which require licensing by an alternative quantifier or approached Indef<sub>Q<\/sub>\u00a0as Polarity Items (Hengeveld et al. 2019). In the talk, I will present a set of data on the interaction of Indef<sub>Q<\/sub>\u00a0with scopal and presuppositional operators, which is problematic for both approaches. Instead, I will argue for a novel generalization that requires ignorance about existence of a witness of the existential statement as the licensing condition for Indef<sub>Q<\/sub>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Vlad Orlov (MIT) Title: Observations on the Existential Uses of Interrogative Pronouns in Russian Time: Wednesday, April 14th, 1pm - 2pm Location: 32-D461 \u00a0 Abstract: Some of the interrogative pronouns in Russian can be used as indefinites in certain environments, which makes them quexistentials in the terminology of Hengeveld et al. 2023. The interrogative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17942","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\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17942"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17949,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17942\/revisions\/17949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}