Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface [1 ed.] 9789004217935, 9789004204782

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Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface Series Editors Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne) Ken Turner (University of Brighton)

Editorial Board Nicholas Asher (Université Paul Sabatier) Johan van der Auwera (University of Antwerp) Betty Birner (Northern Illinois University) Ariel Cohen (Ben Gurion University) Paul Dekker (University of Amsterdam) Regine Eckardt (University of Constance) Markus Egg (Humbolt University Berlin) Donka Farkas (University of California, Santa Cruz) Brendan Gillon (McGill University) Jeroen Groenendijk (University of Amsterdam) Yueguo Gu (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) Larry Horn (Yale University) Yan Huang (University of Auckland) Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Chungmin Lee (Seoul National University) Claudia Maienborn (University of Tübingen) Alice ter Meulen (University of Geneva) Jaroslav Peregrin (Czech Academy of Sciences and University of Hradec Králové) Allan Ramsay (University of Manchester) Rob van der Sandt (Radboud University Nijmegen) Kjell Johan Sæbø (University of Oslo) Robert Stalnaker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Martin Stokhof (University of Amsterdam) Henk Zeevat (University of Amsterdam) Thomas Ede Zimmermann (University of Frankfurt)

volume 33

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/crispi

Potential Questions at the SemanticsPragmatics Interface By

Edgar Onea

leiden | boston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Onea Gáspár, Edgar, author. Title: Potential questions at the semantics-pragmatics interface / by Edgar Onea. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface; 33 | "This book is a substantially revised version of my manuscript entitled "Potential Questions in Discourse and Grammar", that was accepted by the University of Gottingen as a Habilitationsschrift in 2013." | Originally published in German as "Sprache und Schrift aus handlungstheoretischer Perspektive" by Edgar Onea Gáspár. | Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)–Universite`at Heidelberg, 2004/2005. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015045166 (print) | LCCN 2016002639 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004204782 (hardback) : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004217935 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Speech acts (Linguistics) | Language and languages–Philosophy. | Writing–Philosophy. Classification: LCC P95.55 .O5313 2016 (print) | LCC P95.55 (ebook) | DDC 306.44–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045166

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1472-7870 isbn 978-90-04-20478-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-21793-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgement Abbreviations xi

ix

1 Introduction 1 1.1 What are Potential Questions? 6 1.2 Potential Questions in Grammar 18 1.2.1 The Phenomena under Discussion 19 1.2.2 The Explanative Role of Potential Questions in Grammar 21 1.2.3 Meanings in Grammar and Context 22 1.3 Discourse Coherence and Potential Questions 24 1.4 How to Read This Book 27 2 Potential Questions in Grammar 30 2.1 Specificational Constructions 31 2.1.1 A Traditional Approach 32 2.1.2 A Puzzle from German 33 2.1.3 Specificational Constructions and Potential Questions 2.2 Indefinite Pronouns and Determiners 44 2.2.1 Indefinites and Specification 44 2.2.2 Wide Scope Indefinites 46 2.2.3 Epistemic Indefinites 48 2.2.4 Further Evidence 53 2.3 Appositives and Non-Restrictive Material 55 2.3.1 The Nature of the Problem 58 2.3.2 Parentheticals as Answers to Potential Questions 63 2.4 Where Indefinites and Appositives Converge 70 3 Questions and Interrogatives—The Basics 73 3.1 Main Semantic Approaches to Questions 74 3.2 Questions in Inquisitive Semantics 77 3.3 Highlighting 87 3.4 Answerhood 96 3.5 Sub-Questions 100 3.6 Questions and Interrogatives 103 3.6.1 The Basic Case 103 3.6.2 Which-Questions 107 3.6.3 Highlighting and Exhaustification 110 3.6.4 Disjunctive Questions 115

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4 Potential Questions as Parameters of Discourse Representation 119 4.1 The Notion of Potential Questions 119 4.1.1 Standard Potential Questions 120 4.1.2 Potential Questions 127 4.1.3 Primary Potential Questions 133 4.1.4 Likely Potential Questions and the Ordering of Potential Questions 135 4.1.5 Derived Potential Questions 141 4.2 The Representation of Potential Questions 142 4.3 Reconstructing PQs 146 4.3.1 The Question-Answer Congruence 147 4.3.2 Congruence in Alternative Semantics 162 4.3.3 Accommodation 168 5 Nominal Appositives and Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses 174 5.1 The Projection Problem 178 5.1.1 General Diagnostics 178 5.1.2 Speaker Orientation 182 5.1.3 High and Low Syntax 185 5.2 The Proposal 188 5.2.1 Clausal Nature of Supplement Expressions 189 5.2.2 Syntactic Independence 195 5.2.3 The Assertion Operator 199 5.2.4 Constraints and Predictions 204 5.3 Consequences 214 5.4 Conclusion 217 6 The Semantics of Specificational Constructions 218 6.1 The Common Core of Specificational Particles 219 6.1.1 Empirical Properties 220 6.1.2 Specificational Constructions and Potential Questions 225 6.2 Nämlich and und zwar 226 6.2.1 Starting a Discourse 227 6.2.2 Partial Answers 229 6.2.3 Unarticulated Constituents 230 6.2.4 Scalarity 232 6.3 Explanation and Specification 236 6.4 Discourse Referents and Potential Questions 245

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7 The Semantics of Indefinite Determiners 250 7.1 The Story so Far 254 7.1.1 Indefinites are not Quantifiers 255 7.1.2 Only Apparent Wide Scope 260 7.1.3 Indefinites are Quantifiers 263 7.1.4 Indefinites are Nearly Quantifiers 266 7.2 The Compositional System 274 7.2.1 The Intuition Captured and Some Basic Assumptions 7.2.2 The Compositional Details 276 7.3 Indefinites and Questions 284 7.4 Scope Control and Potential Questions 290 7.5 Functional Readings 299 7.6 Lexical Variation 302 7.6.1 German bestimmt vs. gewiss 303 7.6.2 Russian koe-kakoj and kakoj-nibud’ 307

274

8 Potential Questions in Discourse 311 8.1 Strategic Discourse and Potential Questions 312 8.1.1 Questions as Goals of Communication 312 8.1.2 Strategic Discourse 323 8.1.3 Loosely Strategic Discourse 327 8.2 The Representation of Potential Questions in Discourse 333 8.2.1 Discourse Trees 333 8.2.2 Two Example Applications 337 8.3 From Discourse Trees to SDRT and Back 350 8.3.1 Ingredients of an Analysis 350 8.3.2 Rhetorical Relations as Families of Questions 354 8.3.3 Subordination or Coordination. The Case of Result 357 9 Outlook 363 Bibliography Index 385

365

Acknowledgement This book is a substantially revised version of my manuscript entitled Potential Questions in Discourse and Grammar, that was accepted by the University of Göttingen as a Habilitationsschrift in 2013. I have slightly changed the title for the publication because the revisions have lead to a slight shift of focus which is better reflected by the current title. Also, due to novel developments in inquisitive semantics and because of important feedback on already published parts of the Habilitationsschrift I have changed some of definitions, and important details of the formal framework of this book. The research on this project has been supported by the German Initiative of Excellence at the Courant Research Centre Text Structures at the University of Göttingen by the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 2010–2013, which I gratefully acknowledge. In fact, the Courant Research Centre Text Structures has provided the ideal environment to develop the ideas presented in this book both institutionally and in terms of the right kind of productive interdisciplinary intellectual environment. The book has furthermore been supported by the Research Network Questions in Discourse funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 2011–2015. The network meetings have greatly contributed to my understanding of this topic, therefore I am grateful to all members and guests of the network, especially Malte Zimmermann, who comanaged the network with me. This book would not exist if it were not for the continuous help and support by Klaus von Heusinger ever since I started working with him in Stuttgart in 2006 as a post-doc. He significantly contributed to my understanding of the topics discussed here, especially in the domain of indefiniteness and information structure, and he contributed a great amount of insightful comments that helped improve this book in many ways. Also, I admit that I would have probably given up on this enterprise if I had not promised Klaus von Heusinger to finalise this book. I would like to thank Jeroen Groenendijk for many critical comments not only on this and on the previous version of this book but also on various other attempts I made to spell out these ideas over the course of time. The discussions with him greatly improved my understanding of the semantics of questions and their logical and pragmatic properties as well as of inquisitive semantics as a framework. Hence, without his help this book would not be conceivable in its present form. Inquisitive semantics has been an important source of inspiration for this book right from the start. Another person who greatly contributed to clarifying my ideas about this topic is Floris Roelofsen,

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who not only helped me understand what inquisitive semantics is about but also commented on parts of this book and on various other versions of this research. In addition, I would like to thank David Beaver, Regine Eckardt and Hans Kamp for lots of helpful discussions over the years about many of the topics that I discuss in this book. Without the discussions with David Beaver my understanding of the whole framework of questions under discussion and the flexibility it has, would have been very limited. Many of the ideas that I present in this book have more or less explicitly come up in various discussions we had, which I am happy to acknowledge. Regine Eckardt and Hans Kamp have accompanied the development of these thoughts in many discussions about the semantics of questions, information structure, rhetorical relations and the structure of discourse and texts and have given me much motivation and support. Anke Holler, Markus Steinbach, Ede Zimmermann and Malte Zimmermann have given me invaluable comments on the first version of this book. These include both punctual comments that helped me remove errors and general suggestions about presentation and content. I have tried to follow their advice as much as possible. Furthermore, I would like to thank Márta Abrusán, Nicholas Asher, Anton Benz, Peter Bosch, Ivano Ciardelli, Emilie Destruel, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Julie Hunter, Katja Jasinskaja, Udo Klein, Jaklin Kornfilt, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Dennis Ott, Arndt Riester, Craige Roberts, Mats Rooth, Mandy Simons, Frank Sode, Judith Tonhauser, Swantje Tönnis, Anna Volodina, Helmut Weiß, Jingyang Xue and Henk Zeevat for helpful discussions on various parts of this book or on topics discussed here. Of course, all remaining errors, mistakes and shortcomings are my own. I am indebted to Christine Günther for helping me eliminate some of my stylistic and grammatical mistakes in a previous version of the book and to Stephan Druskat for eliminating many of my grammatical errors and typos from this version of the book. I am also indepted to Ken Turner for helping me remove many errors I would have never spotted myself in the final version of the book. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for continuous support on this project. I can only hope that the vast amount of time I spent working on this book and not with my family is at least partially justified by the result. Edgar Onea Gáspár

Abbreviations ! ? cp cg ccp cs ci dp dpq drt lpq nap np nrrc pnap pq ppq qp qud rc sdrt snap spq vp

non-inquisitive closure operator non-informative closure operator complementiser phrase common ground context change potential context set conventional implicature determiner phrase derived potential question Discourse Representation Theory likely potential question nominal appositive noun phrase non-restrictive relative clause predicative nominal appositive potential question primary potential question quantifier phrase question under discussion relative clause Segmented Discourse Representation Theory specificational nominal appositive standard potential question verb phrase

chapter 1

Introduction Natural language utterances are interpreted depending on their context in at least two ways. This is accepted knowledge at least since Bühler (1934). On the one hand, the content of a sentence depends on the utterance context and its parameters, such as speaker, hearer, time and place of the utterance (Kaplan 1978a,b, Zimmermann 2012a). On the other hand, it depends on the discourse context, which serves to feed in values for anaphora, domain restriction etc. (Stalnaker 1978, 2002, Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Kamp & Reyle 1993, Kamp et al. 2011). More recent research contributes more and more evidence that context dependence should be a constitutive component of theories explicating the conventional meaning of natural language expressions and constructions. This book contributes to this research tradition by explicating one particular, hitherto largely unstudied kind of dependency of conventional meaning on discourse context: the dependency of meanings on potential questions (pqs). This complements the recent advances in the systematic attempt to explicate part of the discourse context of utterances in terms of the so called question under discussion (qud) (Roberts, 1996, 2012a,b). I will show in this book that there are several different classes of expressions and constructions in natural language that can be analysed as conventionally interfacing with pqs. At least in some cases I will suggest that the present analysis is more comprehensive and comes with better empirical predictions than its competitors. Moreover, I argue that the notion of pqs is not only justified as a tool to explicate grammatical phenomena, but has intrinsic motivation from a logical and discourse functional point of view. Therefore, it complements existing theories of discourse representation, extending the research tradition of Klein & von Stutterheim (1987), von Stutterheim (1994), van Kuppevelt (1995), Wisniewski (1995), Ginzburg (2012) and others. Before we consider what pqs are, let us start by noting that questions are components of discourse context in general. Consider the case of term answers, which have no propositional interpretation independent of the question they address. In (1), B’s answer is interpreted as conveying entirely different content depending on the question it answers: In (1-a), the information conveyed is that B’s friend had a great hamburger in Boston, whereas in (1-b), the same utterance conveys the information that the most famous tea party in the history of the USA took place in Boston.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004217935_002

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(1) a. A: Where did your friend have a great hamburger last week? B: In Boston. b. A: Where did the most famous tea party in the history of the USA take place? B: In Boston. When interpreting term answers, one has to take into account the question addressed. In other words, questions must be represented as parts of the discourse context. Beyond such special cases it has been often proposed—following Klein & von Stutterheim (1987), Ginzburg (1992) and subsequent research, most prominently Roberts (1996) and van Kuppevelt (1995)—that all utterances address a qud, even though the qud may remain covert. Put differently, the qud is part of the discourse context even if it is not explicitly asked in discourse. This proposal has been useful in the analysis of various notions of information structure (Büring 2003, Beaver & Clark 2008, Onea & Beaver 2009, Velleman et al. 2012 and many others) and discourse particles (Jasinskaja & Zeevat 2008, Farkas & Bruce 2010, Farkas & Roelofsen 2015, Toosarvandani 2014, Rojas-Esponda 2014 and many others), in the sense that such expressions and grammatical constructions conventionally interact with the implicit qud their host utterances address. In this book, I follow this research tradition. I accept the general view that the qud is a significant part of discourse context relative to which utterances are interpreted. However, I will argue that the way in which this notion has been thought of so far is not sufficient to capture the full intricacy of the qud-dependence of natural language expressions and constructions. I argue that pqs, as a particular sub-class of quds, are necessary in order to capture a whole range of conventional aspects of grammatical meaning. In particular, I will suggest that the meaning of some indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of specificational constructions, and the meaning of some nominal appositives and non-restrictive relative clauses can be explicated successfully using this notion as a parameter of context. However, the notion of pqs is not only relevant for capturing facts about grammaticalised context dependency. It also allows a natural modeling of a whole range of discourse moves. One can, therefore, get an idea of what pqs are even without looking at their function in grammar. The core intuition behind the notion of pqs and their place in the general architecture of a qud-based model of discourse context is this: Natural language utterances not only address questions (Klein & von Stutterheim 1987, Roberts 1996 etc.), they also have a tendency to raise questions.1 Questions 1 This idea goes back to van Kuppevelt (1995), who suggests that assertions may act as question

introduction

3

raised by an utterance may (but need not) become the qud addressed by some subsequent utterance. This is the sense in which such questions are called potential questions. Consider as an example the beginning of Chapter 7 of the first part of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and in particular the fragment in (2). On arriving in Moscow by a morning train, Levin had put up at the house of his elder half-brother, Koznishev. After changing his clothes he went down to his brother’s study, intending to talk to him at once about the object of his visit, and to ask his advice; but his brother was not alone. With him there was a well-known professor of philosophy, who had come from Harkov expressly to clear up a difference that had arisen between them on a very important philosophical question. The professor was carrying on a hot crusade against materialists. Translated by constance garnett

(2) a. … but his brother was not alone. b. With him there was a well-known professor of philosophy … Without going into great terminological detail yet, it is a reasonable assumption that (2-b) addresses some implicit qud, like the one given in (3). However, it is not reasonable to assume that this question could have been somehow present in the discourse context before the information conveyed by (2-a) has been introduced. (3) Who was with Koznishev? In fact, once (2-a) is processed, the question (3) is very likely to arise in the reader’s mind. One could therefore say that (2-a) raises the question in (3). It is hardly surprising that the next sentence in the story addresses this question. But at the same time, one could easily imagine an alternative continuation of the story, in which (3) remains unanswered or even unaddressed. Therefore, we will speak of licensing pqs rather than raising pqs. It may seem unusual to consider possible future discourse developments as a basis for explicating context dependency of some natural language expressions and constructions. However, such examples exist in the formal study of context

feeders. But for the genesis of this book, early work on inquisitive semantics suggesting this very idea (Groenendijk & Roelofsen, 2009) has been even more influential.

4

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dependency of natural language expressions. One recent example is Krifka (2013), but even considering more traditional theories, at least the following two related analogies can be thought of. One can think of pqs in analogy to cataphora as a special subclass of anaphoric expressions. A theory of anaphoric expressions will typically search for regularities in the way anaphors pick their discourse antecedents. For completeness, however, one will need to take into account that sometimes the very same expressions are interpreted as referring to discourse items that are only introduced explicitly in later discourse. Newer research in psycholinguistics has revealed many regularities in the discourse structuring behavior of cataphora, cf. for example Kazanina & Phillips (2010), Fedele & Kaiser (2014). While the theory of anaphora is mainly concerned with anaphoric disambiguation, one may also ask whether regularities govern the choice of referential expressions in expressing anaphora, e.g., pronouns vs. nominal definite descriptions. For instance, one could argue, following insights from Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 2001), that maximally activated discourse items are expressed by light anaphors such as pronouns or null elements, whereas less activated elements should be expressed by heavier referential expressions such as proper names, definite and indefinite NPs. However, it turns out that not only the meaning of older utterances determines the future rules of pronominalization, but also their form, as argued in Centering Theory (Grosz & Sidner 1986, Grosz et al. 1995 or Walker et al. 1998). What may or may not end up as a pronoun in some future utterance is partially determined by properties of the current utterance, mainly by its grammatical structure. One way of expressing this idea is by distinguishing between a backward looking centre and a forward looking centre of utterances. Several operational approaches have been proposed that combine the forward looking contribution of utterances with their backward looking structure to achieve maximal results, most notably the bidirectional approach of Beaver (2004). One can think of pqs as situated in a similar way within the larger domain of qud-based theories. In the research on qud-related linguistic phenomena, the focus has mainly been on identifying quds that are relevant for the interpretation of some expression in the past discourse. As opposed to this, pqs open the way for the opposite direction as well: We are not only interested in the questions expressions answer or address in discourse, but also in those they raise. In the case of questions, however, the forward looking aspect turns out to be even more dominant. Part of the reason is the very nature of questions as devices which impose constraints on possible future discourse developments. pqs licensed by utterances constitute a possible horizon for discourse continuations. This must be taken into account, both when considering the qud

introduction

5

addressed by future utterances, and when analyzing the range of signals speakers may employ to order such pqs on some hierarchy of likelihood or urgency, thereby creating the right kind of expectations regarding discourse continuations in the mind of their addressees. The idea that some expressions in natural language simultaneously contribute to answering and raising issues is not new. It has been explicitly proposed in van Kuppevelt (1995), and is present in various versions of erotetic logics, cf. Wisniewski (1995). In fact, one can think of pqs as a special class of erotetic inferences. The idea has received more prominence in linguistic research due to the analysis of disjunction as a hybrid in Inquisitive Semantics, i.e. as an expression that both raises an issue and answers one, cf. Groenendijk & Roelofsen (2009), Ciardelli (2009) and subsequent research. For example, when a sentence like (4-a) is uttered, two possibilities are put on the table, one being that John is in Paris and the other one that John is in London. There is a sense in which the hearer of such an utterance will recognise (4-b) as a new issue posed by (4-a). Nevertheless, since there is an implicature associated with (4-a) that the speaker does not know the answer to (4-b), the hearer is not likely to explicitly raise this question. (4) a. John is in Paris or in London. b. Is John in Paris or in London? One much more striking example comes from Haida (2011), who observes that the very same particle (ko) acts as both a question operator and disjunction in some languages, such as Hausa, witnessed in (5). This shows that the intuition behind the analysis of disjunction as a hybrid between a question and an assertion is actually subject to grammaticalization. (5) a. Mài yìwuwa: nè: sù zo: ko: kadà sù zo:. attr possibility cop.m 3pl.sjm come ko neg 3pl.sjm come ‘It’s possible they may come or not come.’ b. Za: kà da:wo: dà wuri ko:? fut 2sg.m.su return soon ko ‘Are you going to return soon?’ In inquisitive semantics, the analysis of hybrids is limited to disjunction and some derived expressions, such as existentials. The discussion of the Tolstoy example above suggests, however, that the phenomenon is more general. I will suggest that a much wider range of pqs is needed. pqs, following Onea

6

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(2013c), are licensed by any expression that satisfies their presupposition,2 which makes them a subclass of sound questions in the sense of Wisniewski (1995). Under the natural assumption that (with the intended rising intonation at the end of each disjunct) (4-b) presupposes that John is either in London or in Paris, this would immediately capture the inquisitive nature of disjunction in the sense that disjunction licenses pqs. Still, the case of disjunction is special even within the range of pqs. While, for instance, whenever (4-a) is uttered, some other pqs such as (6) are also licensed and can become most salient in certain discourse configurations, the pq in (4-b) will have the special status of being conventionally associated with the assertion in (4-a). (6) Why is John not at home? Inquisitive semantics suggests itself as the obvious framework for the technical implementation of the ideas of this book, and I will mainly follow the conceptual fundamentals of inquisitive semantics when illustrating the concepts of pqs at a formally precise level in chapter 3 and chapter 4. In the remainder of this introductory section, I will first introduce the notion of pqs in somewhat more detail, and give a brief overview of how one can use pqs to explicate the meaning of constructions and lexical items of the kind mentioned above. I will then discuss some possibilities of understanding discourse coherence in terms of a wider scale representation of question-based discourse context. At the end of the introduction I present the structure of this book.

1.1

What are Potential Questions?

It has been assumed in the literature, especially following the influential paper of Roberts (1996), that all assertions in natural language discourse address some explicit or implicit qud. This notion of a qud has been used to explicate the meaning contribution of focus in assertions, and in a way this is hardly surprising: Focus is generally assumed to activate alternatives (Rooth, 1992), and questions are generally thought of as sets of alternative propositions (Hamblin, 1973). For example, one could say that in (7) the focus on the verb induces alter-

2 This licensing condition, however, will already be both strengthened and weakened in section 1.1 and discussed in more detail in chapter 4.

introduction

7

natives such as the ones given in (7-a), and that the very same set of alternatives naturally captures the meaning of some question like (7-b). (7) Peter [danced]F with Mary. a. Focus alternatives: {Peter discussed with Mary, Peter walked with Mary, Peter had a beer with Mary …} b. qud: What did Peter do with Mary? Since every assertion will have some prosodic pattern which can be analysed as some instance of focus, one can assume that for any assertion we will be able to find a qud it answers. This might not be trivial at times, since we may find several foci, especially in longer assertions. One could take this as indicating that an assertion addresses a whole range of quds, cf. Riester & Baumann (2013). In other cases it has been claimed that focus associates with some particle within an utterance, and does not survive at the sentence level at all, cf. e.g. Rooth (1992). Moreover, sometimes parts of an utterance do not quite seem to address the same question as other parts of the same utterance, cf. Simons et al. (2010), hence the distinction between at-issue and not-at-issue meaning components. However, at least in large parts of the current research, such and other complications have not been taken to weaken the claim that assertions address some qud. Rather they seem to call for technically sound refinements. Another question is whether addressing a qud is only a general property of assertions, or whether this naturally extends to questions as well.3 If one considers a discourse tree model in the sense of Roberts (1996) and amended in Roberts (2012a), the second option seems natural. Roberts considers a discourse a strategic attempt to achieve some goal, which could be answering some main qud. Questions are legitimate in this view if they are sub-questions of the main qud, and in that sense they also address the qud themselves. For example, (8-b) is a sub-question of (8-a). Therefore, according to Roberts, (8-b) is a valid strategic step in attacking the super-question. (8) a. A: Who drank what at the party? b. B: Who drank vodka?

3 I will ignore all other kinds of sentence types or speech acts such as imperatives or optatives and the corresponding speech acts in this book, which leaves open the possibility that the general theory proposed here extends to those cases as well.

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chapter 1

While one would not really expect such a step in direct dialogues, at least in some cases, like the analysis of contrastive topic in Büring (2003), it seems to be empirically correct that sub-questions can be used to handle their superquestions. Still, in the tradition of inferential erotetic logics, this appears to be a special case. Wisniewski (1995) assumes that questions are inferable given some premisses in two ways. On the one hand, questions can be inferred from a set of declarative premisses and on the other hand, questions can be inferred from a set of declarative premisses alone. The former he calls erotetic inferences of the second kind, the latter are erotetic inferences of the first kind. The observation that super-questions license sub-questions as discourse moves seems to be a special case of erotetic inferences of the second kind, in which the set of assertive premisses is empty. More generally, however, one would want to think of these discourse moves in terms of dependency as Jeroen Groenendijk (p.c.) pointed out to me, i.e. a follow up question is licit if information it asks for helps answering the main question. Ginzburg (2012) and Łupowski & Ginzburg (2013) give some examples of how dependent questions arise in dialogue, cf. also Ciardelli (2014). More importantly, in erotetic logics questions do not only arise as inferences of the second kind, but also as inferences of the first kind, i.e. when they do not attempt to contribute to resolving some higher question.4 In an example like (9) it is very unlikely that (9-c) is a sub-question of (9-a), or any other question that might have constituted higher order strategies in the short dialogue. In fact, it is most reasonable to assume that (9-c) is simply asked because the possibility of getting drunk is a salient one, once we find out that John drank a lot of vodka in (9-b). (9) a. A: Who drank what at the party? b. B: John drank a lot of vodka. c. A: Was he wasted in the end? The question in (9-c) is a polar question about a certain possibility, namely that John was wasted in the end. The likelihood of that possibility has dramatically changed in the immediately preceding discourse. Whatever the prior proba-

4 It should be mentioned, however, that Roberts (1996) has, in principle, ways to handle such cases to a certain extent. In particular, Roberts could assume that in such cases a hidden question premiss is assumed which ends up as a super-question of the inferred question.

introduction

9

bility of John getting wasted might have been, it certainly increased once the information was added to the common ground, that he drank lots of vodka. A different, though related, kind of example is given in (10). Again, (10-c) cannot be reasonably considered a strategic move in discourse, since under any reasonable assumptions it is not part of A’s goal to find out why B’s friend did certain things. This is rather a piece of information he asks on the spot, because he has been informed of a weird behavior of B’s friend. One can easily see that without this information, A’s question in (10-c) makes no sense at all. (10) a. A: How are you doing? b. B: Not so fine. A friend of mine told me that I am an idiot. c. A: Why did he say that? The question (10-c) differs from (9-c) in that it is a wh-question and therefore not about confirming some possibility. Still, the immediately preceding discourse move more or less explicitly satisfies some kind of pre-condition of the questions. In particular, (10-c) seems to suggest (after anaphora resolution) that it is already known that B’s friend called him an idiot. But (10-c) and (9-c) seem to have something in common as well. At an intuitive level, such questions are somehow triggered, or at least licensed, by assertions in discourse, since they do not seem to be any (essential) part of a strategy to reach some higher discourse goal. They seem in a sense optional possibilities for the discourse to continue. As suggested above, we will call such questions which would constitute possible discourse continuations potential questions (pqs). The aim of this section is to give a more detailed definition of pqs and to explicate their function in discourse. I will confine myself to a brief discussion here. In chapter 4, the notion of pq will be discussed in much more detail, both in terms of definitions and in terms of their discourse function and representation. In view of (10-c), one might be tempted to say that it is the satisfaction of a presupposition that licenses the pqs, as actually suggested above, but this does not seem an entirely satisfactory approach. Some reasons I will mention here, a somewhat more detailed discussion will be given in chapter 4. For one thing, it is not very clear whether one would want to say that whquestions have an existential presupposition indeed. After all, wh-questions seem to generally admit negative answers without symptoms of serious presupposition failure, as e.g. in (11). (11) a. A: What did John drink? b. B: Nothing.

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It is not part of the aims of this introductory section to suggest a theory of presuppositionality of wh-questions. Some scholars (e.g. Haida 2007) have defended a presuppositional analysis of wh-questions. Even if we assume that they are right, there are at least two problems one encounters in the attempt to capture the common property of pqs based on presupposition satisfaction. Many times when the presupposition of a question is satisfied, the respective pq is still not licit in discourse. For instance, we might assume that (12-a) presupposes that someone kissed John. This presupposition is certainly satisfied by (12), since the existential statement is always weaker than its instantiation. However, it would appear very odd if (12-a) was asked in the continuation of (12). Similarly, one can assume that (12) quite precisely describes the very presupposition of the factive verb in (12-b). Still, it is only in very limited contexts that one could accept (12-b) as a natural discourse continuation of (12), for instance if Anna is John’s jealous wife. (12) Mary kissed John. a. Who kissed John? b. Does Anna know that Mary kissed John? Moreover, it is not very clear whether a question like (9-c) has any presupposition at all. For such reasons, I will not follow the idea to define pqs using some notion of presupposition, though in many cases this will be quite exactly what the new definition will boil down to. Instead, the notion of pqs will be defined in a slightly more sophisticated way while ignoring technical complications for now.5 Definition 1.1 (Potential Questions). A pq q licensed by some utterance u in some context c is such that: c + u ⊧def p and c ⊭def p, where p is the union of all highlighted alternatives of q, and there is no p′ , a highlighted alternative of q, such that c + u ⊧ p′ .

In words, the context alone is not allowed to defeasibly entail the union of highlighted alternatives of a pq licensed by some utterance, but together with

5 Note that there are strong similarities to the definition of erotetic inferences of the first kind in Wisniewski (1995). However, this definition does not assume presuppositional question semantics and is more general, using the notion of defeasible inference. It is fair to attribute the intellectual merit of this definition to Wisniewski (1995), even though I will not generally relate to his work in this book, as the aims of the investigations turn out to be very different.

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introduction

the utterance itself precisely this should be the case. Moreover, no single highlighted alternative of that question may be classically entailed by the context together with the respective utterance; in other words, the question needs to be still open.6 The notion of defeasible inference is meant to capture a range of inferences that are weaker than classical entailment and will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4. For now one can paraphrase p ⊧def q as “from p one can reasonable conclude q in some usual context”. Remains to be clarified what highlighted alternatives are. The technical details of our semantic framework will be discussed in Chapter 3. For now, it will suffice to assume that there are two main types of questions one can potentially ask: polar questions and whquestions. We can explicate the notion of highlighting, following Roelofsen & van Gool (2010) and subsequent research in inquisitive semantics, for each of these cases. Polar questions, such as (13), contain two alternative propositions, the one expressed explicitly, and its negation. Thereby, the explicitly mentioned alternative is highlighted, which we signal with red color. (13) Is John happy?

⟹

{John is happy, John is not happy.}

For wh-questions, we assume that a larger set of alternatives is needed, which we gain by replacing the wh-word with appropriate individuals, cf. Herbstritt (2014). All such elements are highlighted, what is not highlighted is an additional negative element that completes the set of logical possibilities. (14) Who is happy? ⟹ {John is happy, Max is happy … Nobody is happy.}

One advantage of such an approach is that questions always exhaust the entire range of logical possibilities, however, the set of highlighted propositions can suggest a weaker domain of inquiry. It is useful to leave open, as orthogonal to the research program of this book, whether wh-questions actually have an existential presupposition: The necessary distinction can now be drawn on weaker and thereby safer grounds. 6 This part of the definition is actually redundant, if one assumes a general discourse rule according to which one can only ask questions that have not yet been answered. However, I decided to carry this piece of redundancy around in the entire discussion of pqs in this book, because it bundles the relevant aspects in a practical way. Moreover, within certain limits, one might be interested in modeling redundancies in discourse. In such a case, one would want to allow questions that have already been answered. Still, according to the definition, such questions would not qualify as pq even if they were licit (for independent reasons) in discourse.

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The definition 1.1 above suggests that a polar question q can become a pq licensed by some utterance u iff that utterance defeasibly but not classically entails the highlighted alternative of that question. Consider for example (9-c), repeated as (15), where it is also shown that the question has two alternatives, as expected, one of them being highlighted. (15) a. B: John drank a lot of vodka. b. A: Was he wasted in the end? {John was wasted in the end, John was not wasted in the end }

The proposition that John drank a lot of vodka defeasibly entails that he was wasted in the end, but certainly does not entail it monotonically. Put differently, it increases the probability of the proposition that John was wasted in the end, although not to 1. Therefore, this piece of information licenses (15-b). There is, of course, a natural worry here that a continuation of the kind suggested in (16) seems also possible, even though, actually, the highlighted alternatives are turned around, as shown in (16-b). (16) a. B: John drank a lot of vodka. b. A: Was he still sober at the end? {John was sober at the end, John was not sober at the end } = {John was not wasted in the end, John was wasted in the end }

While there is no doubt that (16) is a valid discourse sequence, it is not an instance of pqs. I readily admit that pqs are not intended to be the sole licensing mechanism for questions in discourse. Hence, admitting that (16) is not an example of pqs is a tolerable state of affairs. Still, it does not seem to be a hopeless enterprise to think of (16) as an example of pqs of some special kind, as will be discussed in chapter 4 under the label of derived pqs. The definition 1.1 has a slightly different impact on wh-questions. In such a case, we expect, again, defeasible but not classical entailment, however, this time, they have different targets. It is the union of the highlighted alternatives that must be defeasibly entailed given the licensing utterance in context and it is any of the highlighted alternatives on its own that may not be classically entailed by the licensing utterance in the context. This means that there is no prohibition against classical entailment on the union of the highlighted alternatives. Intuitively speaking: The union of all highlighted alternatives will have an increased probability, and that may reach 1 as a special case. However, none of the highlighted alternatives can have a probability of 1 on their own. Consider, as an example, (10-c), repeated here as (17).

introduction

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(17) a. B: A friend of mine told me that I am an idiot. b. A: Why did he say that? {He said that because he believes B is an idiot, He said that because he wanted to upset B … He said that for no reason. }

Under fairly standard assumptions about causality and human behavior, it seems that the non-highlighted alternative that B’s friend said that B is an idiot for no volitional reason or without any causal explanation is ruled out by the very fact that B’s friend made the respective utterance. After all, we generally assume that human behavior happens for some reason (which is quite often volitional). All the other alternatives jointly, modulo contextual restriction, amount to the totality of still conceivable reasons for the behavior of B’s friend, i.e. the existential statement that there is some explanation for his behavior. This seems defeasibly entailed by (17-a). Crucially, however, none of the alternatives themselves are in any way entailed by (17-a) in the context. Therefore, we say that (17-a) licenses (17-b) as a pq in the given context. Consider, in addition, the counter-examples in (12), repeated as (18). In particular, under a plain presuppositional analysis of pqs, one might have predicted that (18-a) or (18-b) are licensed by (18) as pqs. (18) Mary kissed John. a. Who kissed John? { Mary kissed John, Anna kissed John, Peter kissed John … Nobody kissed John } b. Does Anna know that Mary kissed John? {Anna knows that Mary kissed John, Anna does not know that Mary kissed John }

Under the definition 1.1, this is no longer the case. For (18-a), indeed, (18) entails the union of all alternatives, i.e. that someone kissed John, however it also entails one of the highlighted alternatives, which violates the definition. For (18-b), on the other hand, the definition of pqs does not seem to apply at all. Only in special contexts one could even defeasibly infer from the fact that Mary kissed John, that Anna knows about it, or that she would even care. In such contexts, arguably, (18-b) would be a natural discourse continuation indeed. Given the definition of pqs, some special cases attract attention. These are defined as follows.

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Definition 1.2 (Standard Potential Questions). A pq q licensed by some utterance u in some context c is a Standard Potential Question (spq) licensed by u in c, iff c + u ⊧ p, where p is the union of highlighted alternatives in q.

spq is the only notion of pq that can be given in monotonic, non-probabilistic logical setting. spqs are valid inferences in Wisniewski (1995). They are a very useful notion for formally studying the behavior and representation of pqs, but they are of limited use in discourse pragmatics. One of the immediate consequences of the definition 1.2 is that it is not possible to have polar questions as spqs. The reason is that polar questions only have one highlighted alternative. The definition of pqs forbids that any highlighted alternative is entailed by the licensing utterance in context, whereas the definition of spqs requires that the union of all highlighted alternatives is entailed by the licensing utterance in context. Since the union of one alternative is that alternative itself, the two definitions lead to a clear contradiction. Even in the realm of wh-questions, not all pqs are spqs. Consider for instance the contrast in (19). (19) a. Who is in the house? { John is in the house, Mary is in the house … Nobody is in the house.} b. The lights are on in the house. c. Someone is in the house. Both (19-b) and (19-c) license (19-a) as a pq. This is because the union of highlighted alternatives in (19-a) amounts to the proposition that someone is in the house. This is defeasibly entailed by both (19-b) and (19-c). Crucially, (19-c) not only defeasibly but also classically entails the proposition, that someone is in the house; in fact (19-c) is identical with that proposition. Hence only (19-c) licenses (19-a) as a spq. A further notion of pqs is the notion of primary pqs. These are defined as follows. Definition 1.3 (Primary Potential Questions). A pq q licensed by some utterance u in some context c is a Primary Potential Question (ppq) licensed by u in c, iff the set of highlighted alternatives highlighted alternatives in q is compositionally derived or made salient by u. The difference between ppqs and non primary pqs appears most sharply in examples like (20) and (21), which are equivalent from a purely truth functional but not from an inquisitive perspective.

introduction

15

(20) a. A: Peter was not alone. b. B: Who was he with? (21) a. A: Peter was with someone. b. B: Who was he with? In inquisitive semantics, an existential is not only informative but also inquisitive, in the sense that it denotes a set of alternatives at least at some stage in the compositional derivation of meaning. Put differently, when we compute what (20-a) and what (21-a) mean, we will invariably reach the same result at least as far as truth conditions are concerned. However, during the process (21-a) will suggest a set of alternative possibilities as regarding possible witnesses of the existential quantifier. These alternative possibilities are exactly the same as the highlighted alternatives of the question in (20-b)/(21-b). This is not just a technical twist. It will turn out that we can use this distinction to capture the following contrast within the framework used here, cf. chapter 6 for a detailed discussion. (22) a. Peter was with someone, namely with John. b. * Peter was not alone, namely with John. Similarly, the notion of ppqs will be useful in spelling out the meaning contribution of indefinite determiners, some classes of specificational constructions and nominal appositives. Definition 1.4 (Likely Potential Questions). A pq q licensed by some utterance u in some context c is a Likely Potential Question (lpq) licensed by u in c, iff q is ranked highest on in the set of pqs licensed by u in c given a partial order ≤s determined by salience. Given some utterance u in some context c, there is a potentially infinite set of pqs that are licensed. Thereby, the set of spqs is significantly reduced and the set of ppqs is an even smaller set (though not necessarily a subset of the set of spqs), in fact, mostly, the empty set. One natural property of pqs is that they may become non-strategic discourse continuations, but they may just as well be ignored in the further development of discourse. This optionality naturally raises the question whether all pqs are similarly likely to be picked up in future discourse development. Empirically, of course, the answer is no. Consider, for example (23).

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(23) A: John fell from the window of his flat in the third floor when he was trying to install some Christmas decorations. a. B: What speed did he reach? b. B: What happened to him? In (23), (23-a) is licensed as a spq, whereas (23-b) is strictly speaking a plain pq, neither a ppq nor a spq. Still, given some general assumptions about human nature, especially concerning empathy, we are much more likely to ask (23-b) than (23-a). In fact, asking (23-a) could rightfully be considered a very rude and disrespectful discourse move in most contexts. It should be clear at the same time that there are no logical reasons for the priority of (23-b), and that there are important and empirically falsifiable factors that determine that (23-b) is more likely than (23-a). We should think of this likelihood as some partial ordering of pqs which is essentially extra-linguistic. This ordering will naturally affect both discourse continuations and possible grammatical interactions with pqs. lpqs are those pqs which are most highly ranked given such an extra-linguistic partial order over pqs. The question is, of course, how one should rank pqs, thereby determining the set of lpqs licensed by some utterance. I will suggest to think of this ordering as dependent on three elements. On the one hand, there is a purely psychological aspect to the ordering relation which cannot be a quantifiable in linguistic theory at the current stage of its development. But, on the other hand, there are quantifiable aspects as well. One is the general frequency of question types (in terms of the used question word) in corpora. We will say that if a question is a pq at all, its ranking will correlate with the frequency or conditional probability of the corresponding question type.7 Finally, one can postulate that ppqs are always highest ranked in the set of pqs. Since ≤ is just a partial order, an entire group of lpqs may arise in some discourse situation. This has the advantage that the difficulties of comparison within and between the factors of ordering can be partially ignored making weak assumptions about ordering. The weakest assumption is that questions of

7 One should note, however, that brute force corpus statistics are not very helpful in this respect even if one has a clear distinction between relative pronouns and question words. The main reason is that high frequency questions have a higher probability to remain implicit. After all, the speaker can naturally assume that the hearer entertains that question and therefore she answers it directly, without making it explicit. Asr & Demberg (2012) argue that causal and explanative discourse relations are implicit most of the time and come to a very high frequency only if implicit and explicit realizations are summed up. This is a clear signal that why and how come questions are good candidates for being lpqs based on their frequency alone.

introduction

17

explanation/justification expressed by why or how come and ppqs are always lpqs and nothing else is a lpq. Of course, this ranking can be overwritten in certain discourse configurations. Finally, one might ask what types of speech acts license pqs. At first sight, the definitions above exhibit a certain irritating unclarity, since the licensor of pqs is described as an utterance. However, the relevant property of licensing utterances seems to be informativity, a core property of assertions. In the same vein, in all examples, the licensors have been assertions. The suspicion that only assertions can license pqs seems, therefore, justified. However, this is not intended. Any speech act can license pqs. It just happens to be the case that the best understood speech acts are assertions, and assertions seem, indeed, to license pqs in the most systematic way, simply by virtue of their informative content. However it is by no means the case that other speech acts are entirely uninformative. For instance, any speech act may introduce new discourse referents whose mention in discourse may lead to pqs of clarification. One example is given in (24). (24) a. A: Did John come to the party? b. B: Who is John? One may worry that the question (24-b) is not actually a pq: after all, the disjunction of the highlighted alternatives seems to amount to the inference that John is somebody. But the probability of this inference certainly did not increase by the mention of John in (24-a). However, the question (24-b) should really not amount to alternatives enumerating different social roles or properties individuals might have. Instead, the question is really about properties of John that are relevant in discourse, or about finding out which individual is relevant in discourse, why that individual is relevant in discourse etc. Under such a reading, (24-b) naturally comes out as a pq. Another example involves implicatures any kind of utterance may carry. For instance in (25), (25-b) seems to carry the conversational implicature that A does not want to answer B’s question or that A is opting out of the conversation or the like. Such an implicature naturally licenses the pq in (25-c). (25) a. B: Where have you been last night? b. A: What a beautiful day! c. B: Why don’t you want to answer my question? Similarly, assertions do not only license pqs by virtue of their informative content. Their presuppositions and their implicatures may just as well license

18

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pqs. Similarly, referents introduced by assertions raise pq in the same way (24) does. Moreover, sometimes the sheer fact that some utterance has been made already licenses pqs like Why did you say that? or Do you really believe that? or Are you kidding? which seem to be targeting the concordance with general rules of conversation and Gricean maxims (Grice, 1975). I will not attempt to formally capture the details of such examples in this book, but one should certainly be aware that pqs are a much more general notion than the limited scope of this book would seem to suggest.

1.2

Potential Questions in Grammar

A qud-model of discourse context as developed in Roberts (1996) provides an intuitive theory of information structure. Still, one may ask whether quds are really necessary in explicating information structural phenomena, or at least whether questions make life easier. In fact, if one thinks of information structural phenomena within conditionals or deeply embedded contexts, the notion of questions seems rather problematic. Some scholars, e.g. Schwarzschild (1999), have not adopted a qud-based view on information structure for such reasons. Still, question-based explications of information structural phenomena appear to be highly attractive and have been often employed, e.g. in Beaver & Clark (2008), Beaver & Velleman (2011). The reason seems to be that quds are independently conceptually motivated based on general principles of discourse rationality, as widely argued in Roberts (2012a) but already discussed much earlier in Klein & von Stutterheim (1987). Therefore, explicating meanings in terms of their interaction with quds seems both functionally and technically on the right track. One can think in similar terms when it comes to the role of pqs at the semantics-pragmatics interface. I claim that there are some (and potentially many more) phenomena in natural language grammar that can be captured using the notion of pq as an analytical tool. The grammatical phenomena under discussion are specificational constructions, nominal appositives and non-restrictive relative clauses and the semantics of indefinite determiners. These are clearly distinct phenomena that turn out to be related only due to the specific kind of approach based on pqs advocated here. This common aspect of these phenomena has remained unnoticed in the available literature. The kind of analysis I ultimately aim at is roughly outlined in the rest of this section. The main motivation is given in chapter 2 and the details of the analysis are given in the corresponding thematic chapters. At this point I will only give a sneak preview. After that, I discuss three ways in which one can conceptualise the role

introduction

19

of pq in the analysis of grammatical phenomena, followed by some assumptions about the grammatical interfaces involved. 1.2.1 The Phenomena under Discussion Following ideas suggested in Onea & Volodina (2011), specificational constructions with English namely (and similar constructions in other languages) conventionally mark that they provide the term answer to a pq licensed by the host sentence. Generally, specificational constructions answer ppqs licensed by some indefinite expression, but in some contexts and in some languages this may extend to a wider class of lpqs. For an example like (26), the semantic contribution of namely consists in marking that the term Mary is to be interpreted as an answer to a ppq raised by the first sentence. (26) John saw a woman. Namely Mary. a. John saw a woman. b. Which woman did John see? c. John saw Mary.

host pq licensed by (26-a) term answer to (26-b)

Nominal appositives and non-restrictive relative clauses will be analysed along the very same lines, following Ott (2014) and Ott & Onea (2014). The main difference is that for these expressions the range of pqs that can be addressed is larger. Two examples are given in (27) and (28).8 (27) John, a friend of mine, is happy. a. John is happy. b. Who is John? c. He is a friend of mine. d. John [He is a friend of mine.] is happy.

host pq licensed by (27-a) term answer to (27-b) interpolation

(28) Mary met John, who did not tell her about us, yesterday. a. Mary met John yesterday. host b. Did John tell Mary about us? pq licensed by (28-a) c. He did not tell her about us. term answer to (28-b) d. Mary met John [Hewho did not tell her about us] yesterday. interpolation

8 Some additional complications appear for non-restrictive relative clauses, when making sure that the anaphoric expression referring to the anchor gets spelled out as a relative pronoun.

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If such an analysis of three different kinds of parentheticals can be given, one may ask whether all parentheticals could be analysed as answers to pqs licensed by the host. This is not generally true, as parentheticals might also be licensed by discourse independent factors, by sudden memory flashbacks of the speaker, by a car passing by while a speech act is uttered as in (29), a kind of example pointed out to me by Marga Reis (p.c.), etc. Nevertheless, appositives are often answers to pqs licensed by their hosts. (29) Small talk between A and B during a bus ride. A: I wanted to visit Mary—oh, did you see that Lamborghini on the left?— but she was not at home. At the same time, another question arises. If parentheticals answer pqs licensed by the host utterance, they seem to be a kind of anaphoric expression and therefore they exhibit a “backward looking” behavior. Since pqs, however, are essentially forward looking, one would also expect that grammar provides means to steer the role they may play in future discourse at the very moment they are generated. While there may be other such devices as well, in this book I concentrate on indefinite pronouns and show that they not only have such a discourse function, but also that this discourse function may be the only or at least the main part of their lexical semantic meaning. One case in point is the German indefinite determiner irgendein. Roughly following Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002), the example (30) shows that one cannot ask a specification question after the epistemic indefinite with irgendein. At the same time, irgendein does not license namely continuations, even if it occurs in referentially transparent, non-quantificational environments in which the respective pq ought to be derivable, as shown in (31). (30) a. A: Jemand hat angerufen. jemand has called. ‘Somebody has called’ B: Wer war es? who was it ‘Who was it?’ b. A: Irgendjemand hat angerufen. irgendjemand has called ‘Somebody has called’

introduction

21

B: # Wer war es? Who was it Who was it? (31) a. Jemand hat angerufen, nämlich Peter. jemand has called namely Peter ‘Somebody has called, namely Peter.’ b. # Irgendjemand hat angerufen, nämlich Peter irgendjemand has called namely Peter ‘Somebody has called, namely Peter.’ Based on such observations, one can hypothesise that the discourse function of irgend-indefinite pronouns in German is to signal that a corresponding ppq is not intended to be relevant in discourse. It is a well known fact that, both for various kinds of parentheticals and for indefinites, numerous types of analyses have been already proposed in the literature, and a great number of problems have been identified that each analysis ought to be able to solve in some way. For instance, many of the indefinite determiners found in various languages impose constraints on scope interactions with various other operators. It may not be obvious at all at this point how one could use the notion of pqs to make correct predictions about the scope of indefinite noun phrases. Similarly, one of the main characteristics of nominal appositives is that they contribute not-at-issue content and tend to exhibit speaker orientation. It may not appear trivial to spell out this property, given what has been said above. Moreover, various types of parentheticals come with various types of constraints on binding, dislocation etc. Showing that the approach suggested above can be made explicit and general enough to handle such problems, and that it can do so in a way oftentimes superior to existing analyses, will constitute the main part of this book and not concern us in this introduction. 1.2.2 The Explanative Role of Potential Questions in Grammar Even if there were no single phenomenon that can only be captured using pqs, the fact that pqs are conceptually justified as obviously existing discourse phenomena that speakers and hearers are used to in every day communication still constitutes an advantage of pq-based theories of grammatical phenomena. This constitutes the minimal hypothesis of this book:

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Hypothesis 1.1 (Possibility). It is possible to explicate the conventional meaning of a set of constructions in natural language using the notion of pqs. However, I formulate two stronger hypotheses as well, which I will attempt to defend. Hypothesis 1.2 (Cognitive Plausibility). Explicating the conventional meaning of a set of constructions in natural language using the notion of pqs comes with high cognitive plausibility in terms of usage and processing data. Hypothesis 1.3 (Weak Linguistic Necessity). Explicating the conventional meaning of a set of constructions in natural language using the notion of pqs captures common features of related linguistic items and cross linguistic regularities. Additionally, the analysis comes with advantages at the technical level of semantic modelling. Hypothesis 1.3 is, obviously, the strongest and the most interesting for linguistic research. For this reason, I will primarily focus on arguing for it. Still, it is important to clarify that I consider even Hypothesis 1.1 a respectable result, because it may open new ways of thinking about the phenomena mentioned above. Therefore, when discussing the details of modelling grammatical phenomena, I will attempt to separate arguments in favour of Hypothesis 1.1, as a basic result, from additional aspects contributing to increase the plausibility of Hypothesis 1.2 or Hypothesis 1.3. 1.2.3 Meanings in Grammar and Context The main theoretical discussion addressed by this book is the context dependency of meaning and interpretation. I assume that the conventional meaning of natural language expressions, just like the Kaplanian character, is not context dependent in any way. Put differently, any expression of English or any other language will conventionally mean exactly the same in any context in which it may be uttered. I assume that this conventional meaning is derived by an interpretation function in a compositional way following the standard Montagovian program. Thereby syntax determines the mode of composition. One way to think of this is in terms of trees. I will make this assumption, however, not much will hinge on this particular decision, except for some—admittedly few—cases in which I will need to be concerned with compositional details in the calculation of conventional meanings. The more crucial decision, mainly following current minimalist syntax, is that syntactic structure alone does not determine the overtly visible material. This means that the rules of linearization do not

introduction

23

only depend on the syntactic structure, but also on more general principles of cognitive economy or further post-syntactic conventions. Conventional meanings of sentences or clauses are in many cases propositions. In many other cases, however, they are not. Contextual parameters will be required to fill the gaps, thereby establishing the truth conditions. Pqs addressed by utterances may be relevant contextual parameters. Conventional meaning, however, is not exhausted by truth conditional constraints. Instead, certain constructions or closed class lexical items may have a discourse functional meaning contribution. This means that they do not directly interact with the truth conditions of the sentence they are part of. They could just as well be ignored in the process of compositional meaning assembly if sentential truth conditions were the only aim. Instead, they impose constraints on past or future discourse developments, such that in certain contexts they may still ultimately end up contributing to the truth conditional content at the discourse level or in the derivation of implicatures. Having said this, the distinction between discourse level inferences and implicatures is an important one. In some cases, inferences are not avoidable in any context in which the respective utterance is acceptable, even though they are not part of the direct truth conditional meaning component. As a point in case, one can think of presuppositions or other not-at-issue meaning components. In the case of implicatures, at least some context must be conceivable, in which the respective inferences do not arise. Such a context should be normal in some sense, e.g. not meta-linguistic, non-quotational etc. With these distinctions in mind, I will generally use a rich notion of meaning in this book, hence making explicit many aspects of discourse functional conventional meaning, such as, for instance, the focus semantic value of expressions containing the respective focus features. Similarly, I will spell out possible constraints on future discourse developments or constraints on the qud some utterance may address. Only under at least such a rich perspective on meaning the notion of pq can be implemented at its full strength. But of course, much richer notions of meaning and interpretation are possible as well, such as those that are concerned with discourse interpretation and discourse coherence, in which meanings are joined together in much more structured ways. Pqs are useful under such a perspective as well, as discussed in the next section.

24 1.3

chapter 1

Discourse Coherence and Potential Questions

When introducing the notion of pqs, I have suggested that they are parameters of the discourse context in a way that could be similar to anaphoric antecedents. Spelling out this idea in sufficient detail to be able to express that expressions may end up as answers to pqs but they may also raise pqs themselves which should be potentially answered by future utterances, requires a certain level of complexity in the representation of discourse. As long as the role of pqs is fairly local, this complexity should not exceed reasonable limits. One may ask, however, whether pqs could be meaningfully incorporated into a theory of discourse structure in which they can explicate discourse coherence and discourse structure as suggested in Jasinskaja (2011). In Onea (2013b) and Onea (2013c) I have suggested that some version of a discourse-tree model in the sense of Klein & von Stutterheim (1987), Roberts (1996) or van Kuppevelt (1995) has a way to capture discourse structure iff it also incorporates the notion of pqs. Such a theory was meant to compete with established theories of discourse structure such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides, 2003) or Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson, 1988). I will not pursue this idea in this book. The discourse models of Klein & von Stutterheim (1987) and van Kuppevelt (1995) are not formally explicit enough to be an alternative to SDRT, and the discourse theory of Roberts (1996) is too weak in the sense that it can rule out too few discourse moves to be able to say anything meaningful about discourse coherence. Moreover, a theory of pqs is only useful in enhancing such models if it is strongly constrained by extra-grammatical and extra-linguistic factors which can naturally predict salience of such questions. Moreover, as mentioned above, pqs are only one of the ways in which questions can be licensed in discourse. Therefore the role of pqs in modelling discourse structure is naturally limited, and with it the enterprise to capture discourse structure with question based discourse trees. Nevertheless, I still believe that really understanding a discourse requires the ability to tell with fairly high precision which question every single utterance addresses. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that a person who understands a discourse will know which utterance licensed which question in which way. This claim may sound more dramatic than it is. If qud-based theories of information structure are correct, the first part of the claim follows immediately, since any assertion and any question will involve information structure. Understanding the impact of information structure will require the reconstruction of the respective qud anyhow. Moreover, if the respective qud is not justified by the preceding discourse in any rationally reconstructible way, the hearer will

introduction

25

be left puzzled about why the speaker is addressing some question. These two aspects automatically lead to some notion of an erotetic structure of discourse. One can think of such structure either as a tree or a directed graph in which a child node is an answer to or licensed by its parent node. The critical questions here are whether the notion of ‘licensing’ can be theoretically captured and whether the questions forming the nodes can be reconstructed in a way which is systematic. These two issues are interrelated: the more constrained the notion of licensing is (and pqs will certainly be part of that), the higher the chances that the questions forming the nodes can be reconstructed. But this advantage comes with a significant danger of undergeneration and vice versa. Instead of attempting for a question-based theory of discourse structure in which the generation algorithm of discourse trees is theory internal, one may exploit the following observation: If it is correct that a cognitively plausible notion of discourse interpretation will involve some kind of questionstructure, it will follow that discourse interpretations represented in whatever way must be such that at least a homomorphism to them exists from a directed graph (or tree) in which mother nodes license daughter nodes along the lines suggested above. This will allow thinking of the role of questions and in particular of pqs in analysing discourse structure as supplements of existing theories. A particularly simple example, well known in SDRT, is given in (32). (32) a. π1 : Max had a lovely evening. b. π2 : He had a great meal. c. π3 : He won a dancing competition. d.

For this example, one can also give a question graph as suggested in (33) from which one can reconstruct the SDRT representation in (32) in a functional way. The translation function should generally see a discourse relation (i.e. an edge) as a functional composition of a pq, Q and ans sequence.

(33) a. π′ : He did two things. b. Q1 : What did he do during the evening?

26

c. Q2 : What was the first thing that he did? d. Q3 : What was the second thing that he did? e. Q4 : What did he do next? f.

chapter 1

There is more information in (33) as compared to (32). One could, for instance, replace Q1 with Q′1 given in (34) which would still represent the elaboration discourse relation in SDRT. (34) Q′1 : What happened during the evening? In a sense, a question tree can represent a discourse interpretation at a finer level of granularity. At the same time, one may argue that such a discourse may not provide enough information to disambiguate between question trees that would derive the same SDRT representation. Then, SDRT appears to be just about the right level of abstraction to capture some interpretation of discourse. For this reason, I suggest that a theory of question trees as a model for discourse representation should not replace but rather modulate a theory such as SDRT. Whenever a more fine grained interpretation is justified or interesting for theoretical reasons, one may opt to spell out certain discourse relations with more specific questions. One aspect in which the addition of question trees can be useful concerns the distinction between full and partial answers questions may get. Consider an example such as (35), in which the discourse relation explanation between the two sentences seems a default choice. We can represent this discourse with a question tree in which we replace explanation with a whyquestion, as in (36).

introduction

27

(35) a. π1 John loves Mary. b. π2 She is beautiful. c. Q1 Why does John love Mary? (36)

We can ask ourselves whether the answer to Q1 is a full or a partial answer. This is a useful decision e.g. for an attempt to represent and derive the corresponding exhaustiveness implicatures and thereby also contribute to decide whether or not the implicature that John is a superficial guy should arise. The notion of explanation does not in itself distinguish between the two readings arising based on this decision. In a question-based representation, however, one can always distinguish between full and partial answers by replacing ans with ansf and ansp respectively: (37) More specific representations of (36)

With this in mind I will discuss the role that pqs can play in a theory of discourse structure in chapter 8, relating them both to the more general qud model of discourse, and to SDRT.

1.4

How to Read This Book

The book addresses scholars interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface and in discourse structure. Due to a certain—unavoidable—level of formal explicitness, background in formal semantics and pragmatics is required. In particular, basic knowledge of set theory, lambda calculus and predicate logics are indispensable tools to read this book. Chapter 2 is the only important exception, being largely informal. I have tried to keep the required background

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minimal such that graduate students of linguistics can find this book accessible. Still, especially in chapters 3, 7 and 8 the formalism will occasionally become somewhat demanding. In such cases, I generally attempt to explain the main ideas informally prior to introducing the formal details. The book starts out with the empirical, widely informal chapter 2 in which I mainly attempt to motivate the approach taken in this book on intuitive, conceptual and cross-linguistic grounds. I try to show in this chapter that a close look at the empirical phenomena to be discussed in the book shows connections between indefinites, various kinds of parentheticals and questions which have mainly gone unnoticed in the literature. These connections constitute the main reason to develop the framework of pqs. This happens in chapter 3 and in chapter 4. In particular, in chapter 3, I introduce the relevant aspects of inquisitive semantics, including some compositional aspects of the semantics of interrogatives, answerhood conditions for questions and the notion of sub-questions. In chapter 4, I focus on the definition and representation of pqs in discourse as well as on formal hints allowing the reconstruction of pqs. The main hint, the focus-question congruence rule, is discussed in some detail. Chapters 5–7 discuss the details of implementation of the ideas developed in chapter 2 and discuss in detail how the suggested analysis improves on existing approaches to indefinites and parentheticals. Finally, chapter 8 discusses the possibilities of complementing theories of discourse structure with the notion of pq, at the same time showing some of the philosophical motivation and also the natural limits of the framework proposed in this book. I wish to end this introductory section with a note on the limited ambitions I have in this book. This book is concerned with several phenomena, and we will need to become explicit about a whole range of notions such as questions, answers to questions, focus etc. in order to be able to make clear enough what is actually claimed here. But the notions touched in passing are not trivial. Moreover, the phenomena discussed have been very extensively studied already. Even just a study of nominal appositives would have a natural tendency to be longer than this entire book, and actually there are several dissertations on this very topic already. The complexity of indefiniteness is by no means smaller. In fact, even just to faithfully characterise a significant part of the semantic literature on any of these topics would probably require a book on its own right, let alone the syntactic literature, which is typically much larger. Similarly, if one is to suggest a compositional analysis of questions or indefinites, there is immediately a whole range of potential problems: how do we handle quantification of various kinds, how do we handle embedding under opaque contexts etc. I will not be able to answer all of these questions. Having said this, I do not have the ambition in this book to give a full theory

introduction

29

of indefinites, a compositional semantics of questions or a detailed analysis of non-restrictive relative clauses. This book is about the role pqs can play in understanding these phenomena. Spelling out the ultimate details of each of the outlined approaches is left to further research. In a sense, then, this book is programmatic. But then again, this seems to naturally follow from the fact that this book introduces a new notion, the notion of pqs, into the linguistic discussion. The very idea of this book should be to open up a new way to think about some of the problems discussed here and encourage further research along those lines.

chapter 2

Potential Questions in Grammar Some notion of pqs along the lines pointed out in the introductory chapter can be used to analyse a family of discourse moves. This is hardly surprising if one considers pqs to be a more explicit way of speaking about the intuition of van Kuppevelt (1995) that assertions may not only answer but also raise questions. However, it is not obvious at all whether this has any significant benefit in terms of linguistic theorizing when compared to alternative ways of thinking about the respective discourse moves. Consider an example like (1). One can analyse (1-b) as an answer to the pq in (2). However one could just as well say that (1b) connects to (1-a) by establishing an explanation or explanation⋆ discourse relation in terms of SDRT (Asher & Lascarides 2003). Having said this, there seems to be no puzzle here that could be solved using pqs. Therefore, it is not obvious that anything is gained by talking about pqs, even if, intuitively, there may not be anything wrong with that either. (1) a. Still, the economic forecast in Texas has become a shade gloomier for the first time in years. b. The drop in oil prices over the last six months has amounted to a loss of $83 million per day in potential revenue for the industry in Texas, the Greater Houston Partnership said in a recent report.1 (2) Why has the economic forecast in Texas become a shade gloomier? One can try to argue that pqs will end up having advantages as analytical tools if we want to go deeper into the structure and pragmatics of discourse and texts. I will, indeed, attempt to provide such an argument in Chapter 8. However, this will not be the main point of this book. Instead, I suggest that pqs should be considered parameters of discourse context regardless of the ways in which one intends to think about discourse structure. In particular, we need pqs as parameters of discourse context to capture in a particularly parsimonious way a group of grammatical phenomena which have been puzzling to recent linguistic research. The aim of this chapter is to provide a general outline of

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/us/falling-oil-prices-have-ripple-effect-in-texaslouisiana-oklahoma.html?_r=0 accessed on March 10, 2015.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004217935_003

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the grammatical phenomena under discussion and the way to think about them using the notion of pqs. This way, we will not only see how pqs can lead to a better understanding of grammatical phenomena but also we come to discover a link between these phenomena that has remained unnoticed in the literature. Each of the phenomena under discussion will be considered in more detail in a dedicated chapter. For now the focus of the argumentation is to show how pqs provide a link between the phenomena and how an intuitive but fairly informal analysis works. In a way, this is a motivating chapter that justifies the technical effort in the following one. Notice, however, that even though the phenomena will be discussed in more detail in the thematic chapters to follow, the discussion in this chapter is only partially redundant and involves aspects that are not discussed (in fact not even mentioned) in the thematic chapters. Therefore, readers interested in one of the relevant topics (but potentially not the other topics of this book) should take into account both the relevant part of this chapter and the relevant thematic chapter. The phenomena under discussion are specificational constructions, nominal appositives (naps) and non-restrictive relative clauses (nrrcs), and indefinite pronouns and determiners. I will start with specificational constructions and show some advantages of an analysis using the notion of pqs. The analysis will naturally extend both to indefinite pronouns and determiners and to the general class of parenthetical constructions, from which I will consider in detail naps and nrrcs. While specificational constructions and appositives seem naturally connected, indefinites seem to be an entirely different empirical domain. This is certainly true if one considers the main insights from the theoretical literature, which mainly focuses on referential issues when considering indefinites, and on speaker orientation, syntactic attachment and projection for appositives. However, I will argue in the last section of this chapter that the two empirical domains are naturally understood as closely connected, in fact as one single functional domain.

2.1

Specificational Constructions

Specificational constructions with namely, as in (3), and their corresponding versions in other languages, with a special focus on German, are the starting point of the investigation:

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(3) a. We think that Queen Catherine knows more about Clarissa and her dark past then anyone. She is the only cast member that has openly acknowledged the “castle ghost” to others, namely Mary.2 b. In this and another legendary from the same monastery, namely Johannes Gielemans’ Hagiologium Brabantinorum, Christina was adopted as a Brabant saint.3 In this section I will discuss some ways in which one can analyse such specificational constructions in a traditional way and suggest that using pqs opens a more direct and more intuitive analysis. 2.1.1 A Traditional Approach The most natural approach to such constructions with namely seems to be that they are somehow connected to not fully specific expressions introducing some discourse referent such as indefinite or definite NPs and that namely constructions provide a more specific description. In (3-a) the definite NP the only cast member that … is specified using the proper name Mary. In (3-b), it is an indefinite NP another legendary from the same monastery that is specified with a proper name. One could spell out this idea in some dynamic semantic theory, such as DRT (Kamp et al., 2011), roughly as follows. Namely associates with some expression that introduces a discourse referent n. In addition, there is a presupposition that some discourse referent (in the immediate context) a exists, which can be equated to n. The presupposed discourse referent a is identified by the anchor. Then, the main contribution is the equality: a=n. For (3-a), this amounts to saying that the only cast member that … equals Mary. Such an approach will need to make sure that specification is possible using various kinds of anchors including indefinite, definite and quantificational NPs, as shown in (4). Moreover, some restriction on possible arguments of namely must be imposed in order not to allow non-individual denoting ones, as suggested in (5), while allowing generic and concept-level identifications: (4) a. A friend of mine, namely John, sang at the party. b. Every friend of mine, namely John, Peter and Andy, sang at the party. c. The best artist in town, namely John, sang at the party.

2 http://www.latintimes.com/reign-season-1-spoilers-major-casting-reveals-mystery-clarissa135516 accessed on July 1, 2015. 3 http://www.rug.nl/staff/s.a.folkerts/research?lang=en accessed on July 2, 2015.

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(5) a. A friend of mine, namely the man you saw with Jane, sang at the party. b. # A friend of mine, namely a good friend of mine, sang at the party. c. The concept is not exactly Robo-Realtor, but the Boston-area realty company is convinced that technology can eliminate the selling broker, namely the agent that finds a buyer for the listed home. (COCA) Such further constraints do not seem to be technically complicated or conceptually problematic, hence, one can assume that the traditional approach just sketched is doing fine with the data. But cross linguistic data suggest that the situation is more complicated. 2.1.2 A Puzzle from German If one looks at a language like German, an unexpected puzzle arises that casts significant doubts on this default kind of approach, or at least about its generality. Consider the naturally occurring examples in (6). (6) a. Für den eingeborenen Sohn wählt Gott schon vor aller Zeit For the only son picks God already before all time eine besondere Mutter, nämlich Maria, aus. a special mother nämlich Mary out ‘God chose a special mother for his only-born son before all time, namely Mary.’4 b. Definitiv auch außergewöhnlich ist das Alter der „Abgeordneten“, die ihm aufmerksam zuhören. ‘The age of the “senators” who attentively listen to him, is definitely remarkable.’ Die sind nämlich im Schnitt gerade mal 16 Jahre alt. they are nämlich on average just about 16 years old ‘They are only 16 years old on average.’5 c. Durch diese beiden Ängste verhalten wir uns schüchtern und lassen uns davon abhalten, selbstsicher und selbstbewusst aufzutreten. ‘Through these two fears we become shy; they keep us from acting confidently and assertively.’ 4 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffabilis_Deus accessed on July 7, 2015. 5 http://www.finanzforscher.de/wissen/wie-funktioniert-das-europaeische-parlament accessed on July 7, 2015.

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Selbstbewusst aufzutreten ist nämlich immer mit einem Risiko confident act is nämlich always with a risk verbunden, dem Risiko, von anderen abgelehnt zu werden. associated the risk of others denied to become ‘After all, acting assertively is associated with a risk, the risk of being denied.’6 While in (6-a) the usage of nämlich is quite exactly the same as the usage of English namely, for the other two examples the generalization is gradually more difficult. In (6-b), there is a sense in which the age of the listeners is indeed specified by the nämlich-clause, however, this seems to happen in an unexpected way. Instead of the expected construction, namely 16 years on average, we get a whole CP. But this CP at least gives the expected specificational information. One could potentially argue, therefore, that the specificational function of German nämlich is not syntactically constrained to NPs, as it is in English. Rather, it can be achieved with full propositional descriptions as well. Even this analysis seems way too strong, in fact outright wrong, for (6-c). In (6-c) some specification is going on, i.e. there is an appositive specifying some risk. But that has nothing to do with nämlich, and remarkably, nämlich is not part of that appositive. In fact, if nämlich were to be omitted, it would not change that part of the meaning. What nämlich contributes more likely in this example is an explanative, justificational meaning, translated with after all. This is a well-known fact about German nämlich, and in most of the literature it is assumed that the primary meaning of nämlich is actually an explanative one, cf. Granito (1984), Pasch et al. (2003), Breindl (2008) and others. One could argue that nämlich is ambiguous between a specificational reading the English namely has and an explanative reading the English namely lacks. In particular, clausal usages would be limited to explanative readings and appositive NP usages would be limited to the specificational use, as observed e.g. in Onea & Volodina (2009). However, this leaves two questions open. Firstly, (6-b) suggests that there is some kind of intermediate usage which seems to be in between specification and explanation: a full clausal nämlich seems to be used for specification. A real ambiguity analysis does not seem to naturally deal with this. Secondly, and more importantly, the systematic connection between the two usages is puzzling. After all, nämlich is a high frequency particle,7 a

6 http://www.lebenshilfe-abc.de/selbstbewusstsein.html accessed on July 7, 2015. 7 I found over 1,000,000 occurrences in the DeReKo corpus, comparable to vielleicht (‘maybe’) and wohl (‘well’) and more frequent than the concessive obwohl.

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closed class item, and one does not really expect accidental ambiguities in this domain. So a theory of German nämlich should at least explain the connection between the two readings. The kind of mixed usage between explanative and specifications reading seems to be attested even in old stages of German as witnessed in (7), a Middle High German example (around 1200). In (7), arguably, nemelichen has an explanative reading, but at the same time the namelichenclause seems to also specify the very words uttered by the subject, reported here as indirect quotation. This is indeed, the reading captured by the English translation. (7) mit unsiten sî zir sprach und hier si enwec strîchen sine woltes nemelîchen nimmer mêre gesehn. (Iwein line 1976) She spoke to her angrily and ordered her to leave at once, saying that she never wanted to see her again. (Translation by J.W. Thomas) A further question arises from a syntactic subtlety. In German, nämlich can only have a clear explanative reading when it appears in the midfield (also known as the Mittelfeld since work by Drach 1963, Reis 1980, Höhle 1986 and others) of a verb-second clause.8 Hence, (8) is a minimal pair. (8-a) could be felicitously uttered in a situation in which Mary just accepted a proposal by Peter but then realises that it was stupid to do so, as she does not love him. As opposed to this, (8-b) seems acceptable in a situation in which Peter proposed to Mary and she answered that she does not love him, which is stupid because, in fact, she does love him, but for some reason she did not want to admit it. (8) Maria hat Peter etwas Dummes gesagt. Mary has Peter something stupid said ‘Mary said something stupid to Peter’ a. Sie liebt ihn nämlich nicht. she loves him nämlich not ‘After all, she does not love him.’ b. Nämlich: sie liebt ihn nicht. nämlich she loves him not ‘Namely, that she doesn’t love him.’

8 There are some exceptions to this generalization that will be discussed in chapter 6 in more detail.

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Whether or not one assumes that German nämlich is ambiguous, one should ask what the connection between the specificational and explanative use may be and how that may connect to the peculiar syntactic distribution. On the ambiguity analysis, one could have assumed that nämlich is specificational whenever it combines with an NP, and explanative whenever it combines with a proposition. But (8) clearly shows that things are not so simple. 2.1.3 Specificational Constructions and Potential Questions Onea & Volodina (2009, 2011) propose that the semantic argument of nämlich is actually a proposition in all cases. They argue that nämlich does not really combine with an NP even under a specificational interpretation, but rather with an elliptic clause. The elliptic material is to be retrieved from the material of the host sentence such that the anchor is replaced by the nämlich-NP. This is shown in (9), for a simple case. (9) a. Peter liebt eine Frau, nämlich Maria. Peter loves a woman nämlich Mary ‘Peter loves a woman, namely Mary.’ b. Peter liebt eine Frau, nämlich Peter liebt Maria. The problem is that, under such a view, it becomes more difficult to discriminate between the two possible readings. One could argue that only instances of ellipsis are specificational, but it is not obvious that this will discriminate between (8-a) and (8-b). Moreover, one cannot evade this question by saying that the reason is a pragmatic one. Indeed, one cannot possibly interpret (9) as an explanation, and one must interpret (11) as an explanation. Of course, this renders the utterance in (11) unacceptable in most contexts.9

9 In some contrastive contexts the utterance can be acceptable, as in (10) from Stephan Druskat (p.c.): (10) A: Peter liebt doch gar keine Frau, er liebt Männer! ‘Peter does not love any woman, he loves men.’ B: Doch! Peter liebt eine Frau, Peter liebt nämlich Maria. ‘No, Peter DOES love a woman, since he loves Mary’ In such a case an explanative reading becomes more plausible. Giving an example can justify an existential utterance if the existential statement is already under debate. Crucially, a special context like the one in (10) is not needed to interpret (9).

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(11) # Peter liebt eine Frau, Peter liebt nämlich Maria. Peter loves a woman Peter loves nämlich Mary ‘Peter loves a woman, after all, he loves Mary.’ Widely following Onea & Volodina (2011), I suggest that the missing piece of the puzzle is a certain question-answer pattern. This is given in (12). (12) a. A: B: B′: B″: b. A: B: B′:

Why did Mary get a price? Mary got a price, because she wrote the best PhD thesis last year. Mary got a price, (because) she wrote the best PhD thesis last year. She wrote the best PhD thesis last year. Who got a price? Mary got a price. Mary got a price.

The pattern, given for English but also applicable for German, shows that, in an answer to wh-questions, both a term answer (mostly analysed as an elliptic answer) strategy, and a somewhat marked non-elliptic strategy in which the typically elided material is explicitly given, are possible. Crucially, for a family of questions that require propositional arguments, especially why-questions, there is an additional way to give a term answer without any visible elliptic structure.10 This is shown in (12-a), in which in the B″ case the answer to a why-question is given with a non-elliptic root clause. This pattern matches the distribution and semantics of nämlich in German. Nämlich-constructions are limited to explanative usages exactly when they could be a term answer to a why-question.11 In particular, the contrast between (8-a) and (8-b) can be captured by saying that (8-a) is a root clause whereas (8-b) is not. Then, (8-a) is predicted to be explanative whereas (8-b) should be specificational. It is, in fact, possible to show that (8-a) should be a root clause. While a more sophisticated

10

11

This will ultimately lead to complications that I discuss in chapter 6. In particular, if the answer is indeed not elliptic, the semantics of question-answer patterns runs into some serious difficulties. Therefore, when I speak of non-elliptic answers in this chapter I use the term in a pre-theoretical way. I speak of why-questions here only as a very rough approximation. We will see in chapter 6 in more detail that the notion of a why-question is not particularly precise and it is only a certain reading of interrogatives with why that can be answered by nämlich constructions in German. For the general structure of the argument, this will make no difference at the moment, but it will become very important in chapter 6, when we try to get at the details of the distribution of nämlich.

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argument will be given later, for now it will suffice to note that adding the complementiser dass, as in (13), renders both instances specificational, thereby neutralizing the effect of the position of nämlich: (13) Maria hat Peter etwas Dummes gesagt Mary has Peter something stupid said ‘Mary said something stupid to Peter’ a. Dass sie ihn nämlich nicht liebt. that she him nämlich not loves ‘That, she does not love him.’ b. Nämlich: dass sie ihn nicht liebt. nämlich that she him not loves ‘Namely, that she does not love him.’ Therefore one could assume, for the sake of the argument, that nämlichconstructions are grammaticalised answers to implicit questions of the required kind. The explanative use of nämlich seems to involve a non-elliptic root clause that seems to answer a why-question. As opposed to this, the specificational use of nämlich involves an elliptic answer to a wh-question gained by replacing the anchor constituent with a wh-word. The common part of both readings is that the non-elliptic B pattern is excluded. And indeed, it turns out that it is possible to reproduce the B′ pattern with German nämlich as well, as shown in (14). The attempts to reproduce the excluded, non-elliptic possibility leads to unacceptable sentences.12 (14) Peter heiratet Maria, Peter marries Mary ‘Peter marries Mary.’ a. weil er sie nämlich liebt because he her nämlich loves ‘Because he loves her’

12

Some speakers of German find the b. sentence in (14) somewhat deteriorated. But this is most likely a matter of pragmatic blocking, as the a. example seems to mean exactly the same and involve more common syntactic placement for adverbials.

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b. nämlich, weil er sie liebt nämlich because he her love ‘Because he loves her’ All that remains to be said is that whenever nämlich appears within a root clause, an elliptic reading is impossible. This would explain the distributional facts. Moreover, it follows from the assumed analysis that nämlich is not polysemous. Its semantic function does not specifically involve specification and it does not involve explanation either. Instead, it involves the discourse function of signalling that a particular family of questions might be addressed. Of course, many details are missing at this point of the exposition. We will discuss them in chapter 6. For now, this empirical basis will suffice. Having such an analysis of German nämlich, it is easy to see that it naturally generalises to the case of English namely and many similar specificational particles in various languages, such as a imenno in Russian, éspedig in Hungarian, érqiê in Chinese etc. They all could be argued to grammatically encode that their argument is an elliptic answer to a question about the host utterance, though there may be various constraints on what kind of question is allowed. English namely, for instance, cannot appear in root clauses, and it does not allow explanative questions in the general case, even though occasional explanative uses with because-clauses can be found in corpora, as shown in (15). This further supports that a unified analysis of specificational particles seems desirable. (15) a. In fact, it may be that a euthanasia statute would make illegal euthanasia easier to deal with in the same way abolishing laws against shoplifting would make that crime easier to deal with—namely because it wouldn’t be a crime anymore. (COCA) b. Dizzy Reed is being teased mercilessly about four girls who are passed out on his bed, namely because it’s a little too obvious they’ve been out on the soggy grounds of the amphitheater. (COCA) Let us turn to the role of pqs in the story. We have assumed above, for the sake of the argument, that nämlich-constructions might be a grammaticalised means to give elliptic answers to implicit wh-questions gained by replacing the anchor in the host utterance with a wh-word, or to why-questions about the host utterance. But why would such implicit questions be assumed, and is it really necessary to assume them? Onea & Volodina (2011) assume as a background theory of discourse the qud-model of Roberts (1996). They assume that a discourse state is charac-

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terised by a stack of questions. The role of nämlich is then to make sure that the right kind of question temporarily appears on the qud stack and gets removed for the reason that it is completely answered by the nämlich-argument. However, Onea & Volodina (2011) do not give any interesting conceptual explanation for why such a stack manipulation would come about. After all, the question addressed by nämlich fails to be a sub-question of whatever might have been the qud before. Consider (16), in which the nämlich-construction addresses the question Why is it important that you survive?, and not the main question raised by A. If this is correct, the kind of discourse move raised by nämlich would not even be acceptable in the model of Roberts (1996). This is in fact a good reason for strict defendants of the Robertsian picture of discourse to be reluctant to use the qud theory to handle nämlich.13 (16) A: Why did you run away, when the robber pulled a gun? B: Es ist wichtig, dass ich überlebe. Meine Frau ist nämlich It is important that I survive my wife is nämlich schwanger. pregnant. ‘It is important that I survive. My wife is pregnant.’ The theory of pqs comes with a very natural explanation of the phenomenon. Assertions license pqs as upcoming discourse moves. The speaker of the assertion is generally able to assess whether any of the licensed pqs might become urgent for the hearer. If so, the speaker may immediately deliver the answer to them, for instance in order to avoid the complication arising if the hearer stops him to ask the respective pq. Such an example is given in (17) vs. (18), where it certainly seems more economical for the speaker to choose (18), at least in terms of the amount of time it takes to give the relevant information. (17) A: I met an old friend of mine on the way home. B: Oh, interesting! Whom did you meet? A: Peter. B: Peter? Who is Peter? I don’t know him. A: Well, I never talked about Peter before. 13

At the same time, one might notice that in the theory of van Kuppevelt (1995), the question which nämlich addresses would come out as a sub-question of the main question, because van Kuppevelt defines questions that appear during the process of answering some main question as the sub-questions of that question. Still, this is an entirely contextual and not a semantic notion (one would probably prefer).

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(18) A: I met an old friend of mine on the way home. It was Peter. I never talked about him before. However, (18) strongly suggests that it is highly relevant that the friend was Peter. In fact, the topic of discussion after (18) is most likely Peter or even the reasons why A never spoke about Peter. Ignoring the aspect that B does not know who Peter is, another question that could be addressed in the discourse would be why Peter was in town or something similar. Using a namelyconstruction either as an appositive or as an afterthought, as in (19), seems to be a natural way to avoid such an effect. In this case, the speaker seems to suggest that the identity of the friend he met is not the main point of his utterance. (19) a. I met an old friend of mine, namely Peter, on the way home. b. I met an old friend of mine on the way home, namely Peter. Some naturally occurring examples given in (20) are suggestive of this. In both cases, the information introduced by namely seems not to further interact with the main line of the discourse. (20) a. He was a self-made man. He arrived in Philadelphia with a couple of dollars in his pocket and went from there to become not inordinately wealthy, but comfortably wealthy. But unlike a lot of capitalists, Franklin always believed that whatever he made was simply to provide him the opportunity to do things that he really wanted to do. So he retired from the active practice of his printing business at the age of 42 to devote himself to what he called his philosophical research, namely his science experiments. And for the rest of his life, he was a silent partner in the printing business, but he never had to work himself for a living after that. And so he was able to fund his own research.14 b. She had quickly discovered that she had something in common with Daventry, namely an abiding passion for glass. But in spite of that, she had come away from the encounter with a one-word description of him. The word was bloodsucker.15 Accordingly, one can think of namely constructions as grammaticalised devices to address pqs licensed by the host utterance by giving term answers 14 15

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5156263 accessed on February 5, 2015. Jayne Ann Krentz: Sharp Edges.

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without turning those answers into major discourse topics. This is captured in a discourse tree as in (21). (21) a. π1 : π2 : q: b.

I met an old friend of mine, namely Peter, on the way home. The speaker met an old friend on the way home. The speaker met Peter on the way home. Which old friend did the speaker meet on the way home? Analysis as a discourse tree:

One should notice, however, that speakers do not have full control over the flow of discourse. Namely-constructions are an economic way to handle pqs, but there is no guarantee that the respective answer to the pq will not end up as a serious discourse topic. Consider the examples in (22), which could continue with long conversations about Peter. (22) A: I met an old friend of mine, namely Peter, on the way home. B: Peter? You dare tell me about Peter? … B′: You never told me about Peter? Why didn’t you? Moreover, it is easy to find examples in which even in text or monologues, information introduced by a namely-construction becomes the discourse topic for some time. In (23), for instance, the main information of the first sentence is introduced by a namely construction. The rhetorical strategy chosen by the author in this case clearly shows that she actually used the presentational main clause and the namely construction precisely to introduce the next discourse topic: the Mokume Gane technique. (23) Around 1985 several things came together, namely my love for nature, my drawing background, my newly found passion for hammering and my admiration for the Japanese Mokume Gane technique. The Mokume Gane technique was developed from sword making. The base metal is made out of copper. It is composed out of several copper alloy layers and is about 3 to 8mm thick.16 16

http://birgitlaken.nl/eng/history.php accessed on July 7, 2015.

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Hence, one should not think of avoiding becoming a discourse topic as part of the meaning of namely. Instead, this seems to be a side-effect of the economic way in which the respective pq is handled by the speaker, without dedicating an own speech act,17 even before the hearer could raise the question. At the same time, this could well be a kind of explanation for the grammaticalization of such constructions. There are precise constraints on what kind of pqs namely-constructions can address. In English, namely only addresses primary potential questions (ppqs) which can be derived from the main utterance by replacing the anchor with a wh-word. In (24), we have the contrast between (24-a) in which the host sentence π1 licenses the same question both as a spq and as a ppq on the one hand, and (24-b) on the other hand, in which the host sentence π3 licenses the question q only as a standard potential question (spq). Only in the first case is namely licit. (24) a. John came with someone, namely with Mary. π1 : John came with someone. π2 : John came with Mary q: Who did John come with? Licit structure:

b. # John did not come alone, namely with Mary. π3 : John did not come alone. Illicit structure:

17

In fact, I will argue in chapter 5 that specificational constructions are handled by a special speech act operator called supplemental assert. But it should be certainly clear that such a SAssert operator is not a fully independent, full-blown speech act operator.

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In German, nämlich addresses ppqs and why-questions alike, i.e. nämlich is limited to likely potential questions (lpqs). Relevant examples have already been given above. Moreover, since occasional examples in which namely addresses why-questions exist even in English, it seems that the analysis suggesting that namely constructions are term answers to pqs not only captures the data within each language but also makes transparent the connection between different languages with different distributional facts. Of course, many details of the analysis are still missing. Chapter 6 is entirely dedicated to developing a theory of specificational constructions along these lines, thereby making use of the technical machinery to be developed in the next chapter. For now, it should suffice to observe that an analysis of specificational constructions with namely in the framework of pqs seems highly advantageous and intuitive. This suggests that there are grammatical phenomena that directly make use of the mechanism of licensing and answering pqs in a limited domain. I will show in the next two sections that this analysis naturally extends in two directions. Firstly, one may ask how exactly the ppqs targeted by specificational constructions are derived, and whether there are other items in natural language grammar which interact with them. I will show that it is advantageous to think of a variety of indefinite pronouns just along these lines: as expressions which directly interact with arising pqs. Secondly, one may ask whether the picture might be more general than specificational constructions might be taken to indicate. I will argue that all nominal appositives and non-restrictive relative clauses can be analysed along similar lines. We first turn to indefiniteness and their relation to pqs in the next section.

2.2

Indefinite Pronouns and Determiners

2.2.1 Indefinites and Specification While the semantics of namely itself has not been the topic of linguistic analysis until recently, partly because it appeared self explanatory what the semantic function of namely was, namely appears quite often in linguistic examples as a diagnostic tool for different readings of indefinite pronouns and NPs. For instance the possibility to continue a sentence as (25) with the expression in (25-a) has often been taken to be a diagnostic for the existence of a wide scope reading for the indefinite some woman.18 Indeed, if namely were to sim-

18

Given that the wide scope reading entails the narrow scope reading in this particular case, the diagnostic is not completely conclusive, but it will do for the current purposes. To

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ply identify a discourse referent, the possibility to continue with namely would suggest that an accessible discourse referent has been introduced. Arguably this happens when the indefinite has wide scope over the universal but not the other way round. Similarly, the continuation in (25-b) has been taken to suggest that a so called functional reading exists. Thereby, the argumentation is that his mother denotes a function from individuals to individuals (λx. u�y. mother_of(y, x)) and therefore, some kind of functional discourse referent must have been introduced by the indefinite, otherwise namely could not be used to identifiy a function.19 (25) Every professor visited some woman. a. Namely Mary. b. Namely his mother. In a sense, this diagnostic use of namely still appears natural under the analysis of specificational constructions suggested above. After all, if we assume that the existential quantifier licenses the respective specificational ppq, saying that namely marks the answer to a ppq, as suggested by (26), and saying that namely identifies a discourse referent introduced by some existential is nearly the same. Clearly, a question of specification can arise when the indefinite has wide scope or functional wide scope, and wide scope and functional wide scope in some sense automatically justify a specificational question as a ppq. One should note that the rather counterintuitive phrasing in (26-b-ii) is really intended as meta-language here. It is well known that the question in (27) has both the reading intended in (26-a-ii) and in (26-b-ii). (26) Every professor visited some woman. a. (i) Canonical wide scope meaning: There is a woman such that every professor visited her. (ii) licit ppq: Who (of the women) was visited by every professor? (iii) answer to the ppq: Mary.

19

prove that wide scope readings actually exist, one would need to consider non-monotonic quantifiers, such as e.g. Exactly half of the professors visited some woman. In such a case the wide scope reading no longer entails the narrow scope reading. For example it could well be that there is a woman such that exactly half of the professors visited her, but in fact more than half of the professors visited another woman. In such a scenario the wide scope reading is true, but the narrow scope reading is false. As examples of proposals using such diagnostic tools, consider Hintikka (1986) or Endriss (2009).

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b. (i)

Canonical functional wide scope meaning: There is a function from women to professors such that every professor visited the woman assigned to him by that function. (ii) licit ppq: Which function? (iii) answer to the ppq: His wife.

(27) Which woman did every professor visit? But being able to rephrase the analysis behind a diagnostic tool is not very spectacular an achievement. In what follows, I will briefly show how an approach to indefinites using pqs can ultimately lead to a novel and meaningful discussion of some more fundamental properties of indefinites. 2.2.2 Wide Scope Indefinites One of the most interesting observations about indefinites, widely discussed in the typological literature at least since Haspelmath (1997) and in the semantic literature at least since Farkas (1994, 1997) and Matthewson (1999), is that different indefinite pronouns in different languages may appear to lexically impose scope constraints. Russian koe-kakoj indefinites impose a wide-scope constraint associated with so called epistemic specificity (Farkas 2002b, Kamp & Bende-Farkas 2006) and some kind of secretive reading (Kagan 2007, Onea & Geist 2011, Yanovich 2005), as suggested by the translation in (28). (28) Kazhdyj student voschischchaetsja koe-kakim professorom. Every student admires koe-which professor ‘Every student admires a professor the speaker can identify (but is not willing to).’ In some sense, the speaker using koe-kakoj indefinites signals that he knows the identity of the referent introduced but he does not want to divulge it. Clearly, if koe-kakoj indefinites refer—qua lexical meaning specification—to some individual the speaker could identify, both wide scope and epistemic specificity follow. But another explanation of the data could be given along the following lines: the lexical meaning of koe-kakoj is to signal that a corresponding ppq of specification is justified and that the speaker can actually answer that question. For this reason, narrow scope interpretations are ruled out as well as non-specific readings. For (28), the analyses are contrasted in (29). (29) a. Canonical meaning: There is a woman such that every professor admires her.

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b. Contribution of koe-kakoj on the standard analysis: The speaker can identify that woman. c. Contribution of koe-kakoj on the pq analysis: The speaker can answer the question: Which woman is admired by every professor? Interestingly, the relation between these two ways of thinking about the problem is surprisingly close. For instance Ebert et al. (2013) spell out the meaning contribution of the quite similar German specificity marker gewiss very similar to an embedded question as in (30). For such an approach, it is really not so clear anymore whether the distinction between pq-based analyses and classical analysis really can be imposed. (30) The speaker knows which woman is admired by every professor. Certainly, the classical story is grounded in scientific tradition. Hence, it has a starting advantage. But the pq-based story does not lack plausibility either. After all, if a speaker utters some indefinite, she may well be aware that a specificational ppq is licensed if wide scope is computed. This question might be taken up by the hearer. The speaker might want to signal to the hearer her attitude towards that question. For instance, she might want to signal that a corresponding ppq of specification is justified and that the speaker can actually answer that question. This would naturally give rise to an implicature of secretiveness. After all, if the speaker invested effort in suggesting that he can answer a question but he did not actually give the answer, it is likely enough that the speaker has good reasons not to give that answer. One advantage of the suggested approach is that the semantics of indefinite determiners now naturally complements the semantics of specificational particles such as namely in the sense that specificational particles and indefinite pronouns now target the exact same pq: The indefinite pronoun signals that the speaker can answer the respective pq and the specificational construction actually delivers the answer on the spot. (31) John kissed a certain woman. Namely Jane. a. host utterance: π: John kissed a woman. b. PQ licensed by π: q: Which woman did John kiss? c. contribution of a certain: Speaker can address q. d. next utterance: π′ : John kissed Jane. e. contribution of namely: Answer q

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(32)

Such a story uses the forward looking potential of specific indefinites and not some intrinsic referential properties. Similar ideas have already been mentioned in the literature. Such an example is the analysis of Romanian pemarked indefinite direct objects. While for instance Kamp & Bende-Farkas (2006) propose a classical speaker-reference oriented analysis, Chiriacescu & von Heusinger (2010) and Chiriacescu (2011) propose that such specific indefinites are intended to become discourse topics in later discourse. In a series of empirical studies they show that pe-marked indefinite and definite direct objects end up as discourse topics with a higher probability. Crucially, this cannot be a side-effect of specificity because specificity is not a property one can combine with definiteness. Of course, becoming the discourse topic at some point and being the target of specificational pq is not quite the same, even if the notions are connected, cf. van Kuppevelt (1995) and Roberts (2011b). This argument merely shows that the forward looking potential of indefinites can become subject to grammaticalization independently of pqs. 2.2.3 Epistemic Indefinites The situation is more delicate in the case of so called epistemic indefinites, (Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito, 2013).20 Such indefinites tend to suggest some lack of information about the referent—typically on the side of the speaker. They tend to be non-specific and often they get narrow scope interpretation. Moreover, some epistemic indefinites may not even appear in plain assertions without any epistemic operator. As a case in point, consider Romanian vreun (Farkas, 2002a; Fălăuş, 2009) indefinites, German irgendein indefinites (Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002) and Russian nibud’ indefinites (Pereltsvaig, 2008; Onea & Geist, 2011). In (33), examples for vreun are given from Fălăuş (2009), showing that vreun cannot appear in referentially transparent contexts but can surface in the scope of modal operators and in questions.

20

Oddly, the notion of epistemic indefinites essentially denotes exactly the opposite of what epistemic specificity means. This unfortunate terminology may give rise to confusion for readers not very familiar with the literature, but the terminology is so well established that I will need to stick with it in this book.

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(33) a. * Ana a văzut vreun prieten. Ana have.3SG seen vreun friend intended reading: ‘Anna saw some friend’. b. Ai vreo conferinţă luna asta? have.2SG vreun conference month this ‘Do you have any conferences this month?’. c. E posibil ca Maria să se fi întâlnit cu vreun be.3SG possible that Maria subj refl be met with vreun prieten şi să fi rămas cu el în oraş. friend and subj be remained with him in town ‘It is possible that Maria met some friend and stayed with him in town.’ (Farkas 2002a) Various epistemic indefinites seem to impose constraints on scope in very different ways. Romanian vreun is argued to be restricted to the scope of operators that entail the existence of epistemic alternatives of the speaker to the respective proposition (Fălăuş, 2009). Hence, it cannot appear with wide scope and it cannot appear at all in referentially transparent contexts, as shown above. Russian nibud’ is not restricted to the scope of modal operators, as it may occur in the scope of plain universal quantifiers as well, however it will invariably scope under some operator. German irgendein, on the other hand, rather exhibits a weak tendency towards narrow scope under operators and quantifiers, but it can appear with wide scope when it exhibits a non-specificity effect and it can appear in referentially transparent contexts. Moreover, Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002) influentially argued that a free choice effect is also often associated with irgendein. It is natural to ask whether a pq-based account could conceivably be able to predict such complex distributional facts. One potential answer to this question could be that epistemic indefinites are a subclass of indefinite pronouns and determiners which do not fall under the scope of the theory presented here. Another one could be that there is some pq-related aspect of meaning even in the case of such determiners and pronouns, but it does not capture the distributional facts on its own but rather in combination with further—more traditional—features. I will suggest a third answer, however, namely that pqs have the flexibility to bridge over the observed variety of distributional facts. In fact, I will argue that the distributional constraints might be an effect of meaning contributions that can solely be captured in terms of comments on pqs.

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It is only the strength of the claim that is unusual. That questions play some role for epistemic indefinites is already established in the literature. For instance, Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002) explicitly use a question-test for epistemic effects. By showing that one cannot ask a specification question after the epistemic indefinite with irgendein, they indirectly show that the speaker has successfully signalled to the hearer that she does not have enough knowledge to answer that question in advance. (34) a. A: Jemand hat angerufen. jemand has called. ‘Somebody called’ B: Wer war es? Who was it ‘Who was it?’ b. A: Irgendjemand hat angerufen. irgendjemand has called ‘Somebody called.’ B: # Wer war es? Who was it ‘Who was it?’ Moreover, they rightly observe that there is a challenge to explicate the interaction between some indefinite and some modal operator in the scope of which the indefinite must be. The reason is that modal operators ‘see’ propositions while indefinites rather seem to contribute individuals or quantifiers to the semantic composition. The technical trick that Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002) use to overcome this problem is to calculate sets of alternatives as meanings for indefinites which expand and become, once they reach propositional status, questions, as suggested in (35).21 Then, the interaction between the modal operator and those questions can be explicated in various ways. For instance, a modal operator can be sensitive to the alternative propositions in its scope, thereby imposing an anti-singleton constraint.

21

Note that the final denotation in the example is still subject to some closure operation yielding traditional truth conditions at the root level.

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(35) John saw a man. a. b. c.

= {Peter, Max, …}

= {λx. λw. x saw Peter in w, λx. λw. x saw Max in w, …}

= {λw.John saw Peter in w, λw.John saw Max in w, …}

It is true that epistemic indefinites come with fairly clear constraints on the referential environments they may occur in, and that it is not trivial to spell out lexical constraints on such environments because the lexical information must be processed lower than the respective (modal or quantificational) operators required by the indefinites, as suggested in (36). This is unusual, since lexical material typically imposes constraints on its c-command domain. So, if one intends to spell out such constraints in purely compositional terms, some ‘trick’ is expectable, such as the idea that indefinite alternatives expand until they reach the level of the modal. (36)

However, the use of some kind of alternative semantics, and questions in particular, to explicate the meaning contribution of epistemic indefinites is not just a technical trick. In inquisitive semantics, it has been argued that the existential quantifier, which is prima facie the most natural and traditional way to capture the meaning of indefinites, raises alternatives in a way quite similar to Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002). Some examples include AnderBois (2012, 2014), Ciardelli et al. (2013b) and others. In inquisitive semantics, the assumption that the existential quantifier introduces alternatives is not always connected to the semantics of indefinites but rather has conceptual, logical motivation. What is even more striking is that there is a surprising variability in the kind of constraints imposed by the respective epistemic indefinite determiners. In order to spell them out in a compositional framework, one is forced to impose fairly unintuitive constraints. For instance, when spelling out the meaning

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contribution of Romanian vreun one will need to impose some epistemic existential constraint in order to enforce the requirement of a modal environment. However, intuitively, vreun does not seem to signal anything of that kind. Similarly, if one spells out the meaning contribution of Russian nibud’ in terms of co-variation, one will end up postulating dependency on world or situation variables (cf. e.g. Pereltsvaig 2008 and Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011), which again does not seem to match any intuition.22 Moreover, the connection between various epistemic indefinites seems to vanish under such theories, even though one would expect that they have similar functions. The way I suggest to think about epistemic indefinites is simpler: Just like wide-scope indefinites on the story suggested above, epistemic indefinites signal the attitude of the speaker towards a specificational ppq. Common to all epistemic indefinites is that the speaker signals that such a question of specification should not be asked in discourse. There may be various reasons for this: either the speaker does not know the answer, or the answer is irrelevant for the discourse goals at hand or for what the speaker intended to convey, or such a question of specification does not arise at all. Epistemic indefinites may either just grammaticalise the general prohibition on the respective specificational questions, or they may grammaticalise some stronger requirement including information about the reason why no specificational question should be asked. This leads to the kind of interpretation pattern for epistemic indefinites that is given in (37): (37) It is possible that EPIST-INDEF woman danced. a. Canonical meaning: It is possible that a woman danced. (i) reading 1: There is a woman such that it is possible that she danced. (ii) reading 2: It is possible that there is a woman such that she danced. b. Contribution of EPIST: The speaker does not wish to consider the question q: Which woman danced? (i) interpretation 1: The speaker does not wish to consider q because he does not know the answer to q. (ii) interpretation 2: The speaker does not wish to consider q because he does not believe that the answer to q is relevant in discourse.

22

Even basic questions about trans-world identity, counterpart theory, fixed or variable domains etc. are still under legitimate debate in the philosophical literature. It is not very plausible to assume intuitions worthy of grammaticalization about such matters.

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(iii) interpretation 3: The speaker does not wish to consider q because q is not a valid question given the canonical meaning, i.e. reading 2 applies. (iv) … I suggest that German irgendein does not grammaticalise detailed information, hence there are various possible interpretations: irgendein indefinites may have wide scope, but in such cases they come with ignorance or irrelevance inferences, they may have narrow scope under various operators, and they may have a free choice implicature in cases in which the specificational question is already present in discourse. For Romanian vreun and Russian nibud’ the lexical information is stronger and differs in perspective. Vreun signals that, given the epistemic state of the speaker, the speaker is not in the position to raise any pq of specification. Nibud’ on the other hand signals that the hearer is not entitled to interpret the utterance of the speaker as putting her into the epistemic position to raise a corresponding pq of specification. In chapter 7, I will show in detail how such a view on indefinites accounts for a number of interesting data. Also, I will provide the technical details of a compositional system that can handle a number of interesting properties of indefinites including their exceptional scope behavior, cf. Fodor & Sag (1982) and subsequent literature. The purpose of the current discussion is limited to show that the kind of approach outlined above not only has the possibility to have an immediate and intuitive take on the meaning of epistemic indefinites, but also naturally unifies the meaning of wide-scope indefinites and epistemic indefinites in the sense that both impose constraints on pqs. While the fact that both wide and narrow scope indefinites comment on pqs appears to be their common characteristic, they mainly differ in the kind of comment they impose. Thereby, an entire typology of possible indefinite determiners can be postulated along the following parameters. (38) Parameters of variation: a. Speaker can/cannot answer the respective pq. b. Speaker considers the respective pq relevant/irrelevant in discourse. c. Speaker encourages/discourages the hearer to raise the respective pq in discourse. 2.2.4 Further Evidence If one looks at the morphology of indefinites cross-linguistically, this approach receives massive support. In German, for instance, the wh-word wer (‘who’) has an interpretation as an indefinite whenever it does not undergo wh-movement,

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as suggested in (39). Moreover, it can morphologically combine with irgend to yield a non-specific, epistemic indefinite. (39) a. Peter hat wen gesehen. Peter has wh.acc seen ‘Peter has seen someone’ b. Wen hat Peter gesehen? who.acc has Peter seen ‘Whom did Peter see?’ c. Peter hat irgendwen gesehen. Peter has irgend-who.acc seen ‘Peter has seen some guy or another.’ This morphological connection between interrogatives and indefinites is pervasive. Ultan (1979) reports that in his sample of 79 languages, in 77 indefinite pronouns are either identical or derivationally related to interrogative pronouns. In the sample of 100 languages investigated by Haspelmath (1997), indefinites are based on interrogatives in 64, and 31 of these languages involve bare interrogatives. In (40) and (41), two further examples are given. In (40), from Lakhota (Siouan) (Bhat 2004, 226), the constituent question only differs from the assertion involving an indefinite pronoun in that a question marker is used in the former case. In (41), from Kannada (Dravidian) (Bhat 2004, 226), a specific indefinite pronoun is morphologically derived from a bare interrogative by adding a disjunctive suffix. (40) a. suka ki tdku yaxtdka he dog the tdku bite Int ‘What did the dog bite?’ b. suka ki tdku yaxtdke dog the tdku bite ‘The dog bit something’ (41) a. ra:ju ellige ho:da Raju where went ‘Where did Raju go?’

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b. ra:ju ellig-o: ho:da Raju where-or went ‘Raju went somewhere’ In the typological literature, many attempts have been made to explain the morphological closeness of indefinites and interrogatives in language after language. Mostly, the idea has been that in some sense they both express referential underspecification. But, with the partial exception of AnderBois (2012), formal explicitness has never been achieved. From the perspective of inquisitive semantics, in which the existential quantifier not only solves an issue but also raises an issue of specification, and from the perspective of Kratzer & Shimoyama (2002), the connection does not seem surprising at all. In fact, one would expect some kind of closeness between indefinites and interrogatives, as they denote essentially the same. A similar idea appears also in Haida (2007). If such approaches are correct, it would be surprising if the meanings of indefinite specialised determiners were not sensitive to this meaning connection between indefinites and interrogatives. Still, the analysis of indefinites that I will suggest in chapter 7 is not really an implementation of the idea that the existential quantifier raises questions. In fact, I will argue that indefinites actually denote some underspecified individual, i.e. they introduce a discourse referent in the sense of Kamp (1981), and that their connection to pqs is pragmatic for the most part. It is only when specialised indefinite determiners enter the picture that a semantic connection to pqs arises. This way, embedding the discussion of indefinites into a general theory of pqs seems to reconcile two different research traditions with their indisputable merits suggesting that the truth may be somewhere in between.

2.3

Appositives and Non-Restrictive Material

The step from specificational constructions to indefinites can be seen as a matter of perspective shift. When we consider specificational constructions, we must take it as given that pqs are somehow present in discourse and that the specificational construction simply targets them. When we look at indefinites, we likely ask ourselves how pqs come about in the first place, i.e. we consider a grammatical means to establish pqs in discourse. Interestingly, specificational constructions only target a subset of pqs and, indeed, indefinites seem to be highly relevant for that particular subset, namely, the conventionally derived set of ppqs. But I have argued in the introductory section that it is only in

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certain, exceptional, cases that pqs are grammatically triggered. In fact, in most of the cases pqs are a result of general pragmatics. Then, one expects a lot more flexibility in the ways in which grammar handles already established pqs in discourse. Put differently, until now it is only ppqs and lpqs that have been argued to be relevant at the grammar-discourse interface. But if the notion of pqs is intuitively correct and captures facts about possible discourse moves, we might expect the whole range of pqs to be grammatically relevant. In other words: Speakers may anticipate that hearers might react in such and such a way whenever a pq arises that is salient enough. Sometimes pqs are quite exactly the intended discourse continuation, but at other times the speaker may not want pqs to create a deviation from the intended discourse aims. Consider a simple example to illustrate this. (42) On Friday John, a friend of mine from Calgary, […] came for the weekend for a visit. We planned to go to the US for a day so that I could take him to a couple of pipe shops in Bellingham, Washington—the Senate Smoke Shop and the Fairhaven Smoke Shop (I have written reviews of both shops here on rebornpipes). When John arrived and we were planning our day he said that he also wanted to visit some of the places where I went hunting for estate pipes when I am down there.23 In (42), the blog-writer tells a story about the events that happened when a friend of his (called John) visited him. For some reason, he decides to introduce this discourse referent using his proper name. Quite obviously, the reader has no clue who John is, so one of the most salient question that might arise in his mind is: Who is John? This question is a pq licensed by the use of a novel proper name and particularly salient due to our general curiosity about humans. The author certainly has an option to address this question in the next sentence, as suggested in (43). However, in (43) at some intuitive level the author temporarily changes the topic of discussion in the second clause thereby allowing further elaboration on his friendship with John, on Calgary, on John’s life in Calgary etc. For the aims of the text, such a detour is not welcome. Instead, the author packs this piece of information into a nominal appositive. This way, he seems to address the pq before it develops its potential to disrupt the narrative.

23

http://rebornpipes.com/tag/pipe-hunting/ accessed on July 7, 2015.

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(43) On Friday John […] came for the weekend for a visit. He is a friend of mine from Calgary. The very same happens at the end of the sentence. Once the author introduced the piece of information that they wanted to visit a couple of pipe shops, he immediately tackles a pq that arises with the particular readership (given that this is a pipe-related blog): Which pipe shops? This question is answered by a parenthetical. Again, the reason seems to be that the author wants to avoid that the two shops become the topic of the discussion. Moreover, since the choice of the pipe shops automatically raises the question why those particular pipe shops have been chosen, and this question is fairly important for the readership, an additional, nested, parenthetical is given that addresses the Why those?-pq. Consider one more anecdotal example from an e-mail that I recently received. The background for this example is that a few days prior to this e-mail, the sender and myself tried to get his van started, and in the process put oil into one of the tanks of the van. Back then, we were not sure whether we actually picked the oil tank, but since the van eventually started, I could presume that we had made the right choice. By uttering (44), the sender contextually and defeasibly entails the proposition that it was the water tank we had chosen. Still, this is not entailed in a strict sense, as it would be conceivable that he put oil in his water tank on a different occasion. So the pq whether that was the water tank is licensed and highly salient. That the parenthetical addresses this polar question is made quite clear by the fact that it starts with the answer particle yes. Crucially, however, for the argument in the e-mail that the sender needs a transport vehicle, this aspect is not relevant, in fact, the writer wants to avoid me following up with an e-mail asking that very question. That seems to fully explain—at least at an intuitive level—why the parenthetical has been used. (44) I put oil in the water tank of my van (yes, that was the water tank!), so either I get on the bus or you come to pick me up. Such examples illustrate the more general point that there is a whole class of constructions which seem to act as a grammaticalised device to answer pqs raised by the host utterance; pqs that are not intended to become the next topic of discussion. Of course, this is not more than a functional description of what seems to be the discourse function of parentheticals. In this book, I consider two main types of parentheticals: non-restrictive relative clauses (nrrcs) as in (45), and nominal appositives (naps) as in (46). Naps will be further subdivided, but for now we will think of them as a group.

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(45) Mary has been visited by John, who did not tell her about your love-affair, yesterday. (46) a. John, a friend of mine, is happy. b. A friend of mine, John, is happy. These types of parentheticals share many of their properties but also differ in important ways. I will discuss some of the common properties they exhibit and the theoretical challenges they pose in the next section alongside with presenting the main idea of the analysis. In the following section I will then focus on some systematic differences between these constructions and the way in which the present approach captures them. 2.3.1 The Nature of the Problem There is a long standing discussion both in syntax and in semantics regarding the status of naps and nrrcs. In particular, there is a sense in which parentheticals are local and there is a sense in which they are non-local, i.e. global. Generally, in the literature, there are two main types of approaches. One group of scholars attempts to assume a syntactic structure in which the parenthetical material is locally computed where it surfaces, or at least adjacent to its anchor. One main proponent of such an approach is Potts (2005). Another group attempts to dissociate the syntactic position from the surface position advocating some version of a high adjunction, cf. e.g. Del Gobbo (2003) and many others. Both types of analysis are shown in (47). (47) Peter saw John, an old friend. a. Local adjunction:

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b. High adjunction:

By local adjunction I mean that naps and nrrcs are part of the syntactic structure of the host clause and they also combine semantically with some element of the host, a.k.a the anchor. As a case in point, consider the minimal contrast in (48). Except for punctuation, there seems to be no difference between (48-aii) and (48-b-ii), but it is clear that while (48-b-ii) identifies one of the two men who were shot, (48-a-ii) simply introduces additional information about the man under discussion. In both cases, the target of the relative clause is the man and in both cases the computation seems to be local. It would be odd to assume that there is a significant syntactic difference between the two examples. One would rather expect the different punctuation and different intonation to signal a functional-pragmatic difference only. (48) a. (i) (ii) b. (i) (ii)

A man and a woman were shot yesterday. The man, who survived, was found by the police. Two men were shot yesterday. The man who survived was found by the police.

Still, syntactic differences between nrrcs and regular restrictive relative clauses exist. For instance, in English, nrrcs are only possible with wh-complementisers, as known ever since Heim (1987), cf. Bianchi (2002). (49) a. * This book, ∅ I read, was good. b. A book ∅ I read was good.

(50) a. * This book, that I read, was good. b. A book that I read was good. (51) a. This book, which I read, was good. b. A book which I read was good. More semantic arguments can also be found. For instance, in (52) binding into a nap seems possible, though some examples also exist that suggest the opposite, as shown in (53), cf. Potts (2005).

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(52) Every inmatei talks to one person, (probably) hisi mother, once a week. (from Ott & Onea 2014). (53) * No reporteri believes that, as hei wrote, Ames is a spy. Moreover, Potts (2005) argued that in many languages, such as German, there is a peculiar case match between naps and nrrcs and their host. This is exemplified in (54) and can be prima facie thought of as an argument for some kind of local interpretation of the respective parenthetical; a connectivity diagnostic. But again, the situation is less conclusive than one would hope, since Ott (2014) discusses examples in which case connectivity is missing, as in (55). The observation is much older, however and goes back at least to Molitor (1979). (54) Ich habe einen alten Freund, den Peter, getroffen. I have an.acc old friend the.acc Peter met ‘I met an old friend, Peter.’ (55) Ich habe den Peter, übrigens ein alter Freund, getroffen. I have the.acc Peter incidentally an.nom old friend met ‘I met an old friend, Peter.’ Arguments for non-locality exist as well. One syntactic argument comes from Ott & Onea (2014). They observe that naps do not count when considering syntactic constraints such as V2 in German, hence they seem locally invisible for syntax, as shown below. (56) Ein alter Freund hat gestern angerufen. an old friend has yesterday called ‘An old friend called yesterday.’ (57) * Ein alter Freund gestern hat angerufen. an old friend yesterday has called intended reading: ‘An old friend called yesterday.’ (58) Ein alter Freund, der Peter, hat gestern angerufen. an old friend the Peter has yesterday called ‘An old friend, Peter, called yesterday.’

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But again, if the appositive and its anchor constitute one single constituent, one would not expect the appositive to count for the V2 constraint anyhow, as shown in (59), where we have a regular restrictive relative clause that forms a constituents with the respective NP. (59) Ein alter Freund, der Peter heißt, hat gestern angerufen. an old friend who Peter is called has yesterday called ‘An old friend, called Peter, called yesterday.’ The non-locality of parentheticals is potentially more convincingly shown under embedding, since their propositional contribution seems to fail to interact with the embedding operator. In both (60) and (61), the inference that John is a friend of the speaker survives the embedding under negation or possibility, even though these are known entailment cancelling operators. (60) a. It is not the case that John failed at the exam and John is a friend of mine. ⊭ John is a friend of mine. b. It is not the case that John, a friend of mine, failed at the exam. ⊧ John is a friend of mine.

(61) a. It is possible that John is a friend of mine and he failed at the exam. ⊭ John is a friend of mine. b. It is possible that John, a friend of mine, failed at the exam. ⊧ John is a friend of mine.

Local theories of parentheticals do not necessarily consider such data a problem. In fact, Potts (2005) locally computes the meaning contribution of parentheticals but blocks its interaction with dominating operators. In essence, this renders the observation useless when it comes to diagnosing whether naps and nrrcs are locally or globally computed. Another observation is that nrrcs and naps do not seem to encode at-issue meaning, cf. Potts (2005), Simons et al. (2010), Tonhauser (2012) or Tonhauser et al. (2013). One can test this, for instance, by considering the target of contradiction: (62) a. A: John, who did not tell Mary about your love-affair, met Mary yesterday. B: No. ⇝ John did not meet Mary yesterday. ⇝ ⁄ John did tell Mary about your love-affair.

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b. A: John met Mary yesterday and did not tell Mary about your love-affair. B: No. ⇝ John did not meet Mary yesterday or he told Mary about your love affair (or both). This is a characteristic that is shared with other not-at-issue meaning types, such as, most prominently, presuppositions, as suggested in (63), where one can see that contradiction does not target presupposition either. (63) A: John stopped smoking yesterday. B: No. ⇝ John is continuing to smoke. ⇝ ⁄ John did not smoke.

Then, the fact that nrrcs and naps tend to contribute to the global meaning, disregarding the (potentially) dominating syntactic material, seems to be connected to the very same phenomenon well known for presuppositions under the label of projection (Langendoen & Savin, 1971) and very roughly exemplified in (64): the presupposition that John used to smoke projects over the entailment cancelling operators negation and possibility. (64) a. It is not the case that John stopped smoking. ⊧ John used to smoke. b. It is possible that John stopped smoking ⊧ John used to smoke.

Simons et al. (2010) suggest that the reason why meaning contributions of appositives and presuppositions do not interact with (some) dominating operators is an essentially pragmatic one: They are not-at-issue meaning components. What projects is whatever is not at-issue. I will follow this suggestion, however, as opposed to Simons et al. (2010), I do not see enough evidence to assume that parentheticals, and in particular naps and nrrcs, are computed locally. Instead, as David Beaver (p.c.) pointed out to me, the very same idea can be twisted as follows: Parentheticals are marked for being not-at-issue meaning components, therefore it is not surprising that they are not subject to local composition in natural language. There are two crucial insights here. The first one is that the projection behavior of parentheticals is not sufficient to diagnose a local or global meaning contribution. The more important one is that, either way, the core property carrying the true explanative burden seems to be not-at-issueness. Importantly,

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not-at-issueness is intuitively very closely connected to the diagnostic purely descriptively suggested in the previous section: Appositives are often used to address a side-issue (that is not intended to become discourse topic). The notion of pqs seems to be a natural way to capture the very essence of what a side-issue could be. The connection still remains to be worked out in detail, as the technical definition of at-issueness seems, at least prima facie, orthogonal to this observation. The theory that I will defend in this book can be seen as a member of the high adjunction family of approaches according to which there is no local meaning contribution of parentheticals. In fact, it is even more radical in the sense that I follow Ott (2014) and Ott & Onea (2014) in that I do not assume any kind of syntactic integration between parentheticals and their host clauses at the level of syntax or, for that matter, semantics. Instead, I assume that, just like in the case of namely constructions, parentheticals are special kinds of speech acts, independent syntactic structures, which are linearly interpolated to reflect a certain pragmatic asymmetry. The consequence is that parentheticals are subordinated in discourse. 2.3.2 Parentheticals as Answers to Potential Questions Following the suggestion made above for specificational constructions, I will assume that both naps and nrrcs are answers to pqs licensed by the respective host utterance. For specificational cases, the analysis naturally transposes: (65) A friend of mine, (namely) Jane, is already married.

The difference between the last example and the predicative construction such as in (66) simply boils down to a different pq addressed by the appositive:

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(66) Jane, the best doctor in town, is already married.

Note that under this approach we not only have a natural grasp on the difference between the two elliptic structures, but given the question-answer pattern involved, we also have a natural explanation for the fact that we encounter ellipsis in the first place. The question-answer paradigm itself licenses ellipsis, as in the case of specificational constructions. Then, as argued in Ott & Onea (2014), no further connection between naps and their host utterances needs to be postulated. They are linearly interpolated without any syntactic merge. The linear interpolation is rather an effect of a rhetorical connection mediated by raising and addressing pqs. Of course, this is still a conventional element of meaning and I will discuss it in more detail in chapter 5. For nrrcs, the situation seems somewhat more counter-intuitive. There are two core assumptions. Firstly, I will assume that the relative pronoun is an Etype pronoun, co-indexed with the anchor.24 Secondly, I will assume that the relative pronoun is topical within the CP structure of the nrrc and therefore naturally addresses a question about the co-indexed anchor. Moreover, I will— quite obviously—assume that nrrc need not be elliptical structures.25 Hence, the analysis can be sketched as in (67).

24

25

Not much really hinges on the question whether the pronoun is indeed an E-type pronoun in the strictly technical sense of Evans (1977, 1980), Heim (1982, 1990), Elbourne (2001). All that is important is that systematic co-reference between the pronoun and the anchor is granted without syntactic binding, because the pronoun is outside the c-command domain of the anchor. Any theory of pronominal binding in discourse which can achieve this will be fine for our purposes. Still, since large parts of the literature have assumed an E-type analysis, I will follow them here, since I see no particular reason to take issue with this assumption. In some cases, e.g. when they answer why-questions, it may not be entirely obvious whether nrrcs are actually elliptic or not.

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(67) Jane, who is the best doctor in town, is already married.

This idea naturally captures the case connectivity data mentioned above: One can systematically distinguish between predicative and specificational naps (Ott & Onea, 2014), though in chapter 5 we will have an even finer distinction. The distinction boils down to the following pattern. (68) I met a friend, John, yesterday. a. I met a friend yesterday. b. pq: Whom did you meet yesterday? c. answer: I met John yesterday. (69) I met John, a friend, yesterday. a. I met John yesterday. b. pq: Who is John? c. answer: John is a friend.

specificational nap (snap)

predicative nap (pnap)

It has been observed very early, cf. Molitor (1979), that in some cases pnaps must not exhibit case connectivity. (70) a. Ich habe Peter, früher mein bester Freund, sehr I have Peter formerly my.nom best.nom friend highly enttäuscht. disappointed ‘I have highly disappointed Peter, my former friend.’ b. * Ich habe Peter, früher meinen besten Freund, sehr I have Peter formerly my.acc best.acc friend highly enttäuscht. disappointed intended reading: ‘I have highly disappointed Peter, my former friend.’

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As opposed to this, snaps are required to exhibit case match between the anchor constituent and the appositive. Under the current analysis, the reason is not some notion of locality, as argued in Potts (2005), but rather the simple fact that specificational naps require to reproduce the syntactic structure of the respective sentence in the pq and, therefore, in the elliptic structure of the answer, as shown in (69). For predicational naps we do not expect case matching since the predicative construction in the appositive typically requires nominative case irrespective of the case of the anchor, as suggested in (70). Indeed, for German this prediction is prima facie borne out, as shown in (71) vs. (72) from Ott & Onea (2014). (71) a. Einer von den Typen, der Peter, hat sie schwer one.nom of the guys the.nom Peter has them heavily beleidigt. insulted ‘One of the guys, Peter, insulted them badly.’ b. Sie haben einen von den Typen, den Peter, schwer they have one.acc of the guys the.acc Peter heavily beleidigt. insulted ‘They badly insulted one of the guys, Peter.’ c. Sie haben einem von den Typen, dem Peter, geholfen zu they have one.dat of the guys the.dat Peter helped to flüchten. escape ‘They helped one of the guys, Peter, to escape.’ (72) a. Der Peter, einer von den Typen, hat sie schwer the.nom Peter one.nom of the guys has them heavily beleidigt. insulted ‘Peter, one of the guys, insulted them badly.’ b. Sie haben den Peter, (übrigens) einer von den Typen, they have the.acc Peter by the way one.nom of the guys schwer beleidigt. heavily insulted ‘They badly insulted Peter, one of the guys.’

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c. Sie haben dem Peter, (übrigens) einer von den Typen, they have the.dat Peter by the way one.nom of the guys geholfen zu flüchten. helped to escape ‘They helped Peter, one of the guys, to escape.’ For a language like Romanian, this pattern seems to fit perfectly, as argued in Heringa (2012). However, in German it is possible to have pnaps with casematch as well, as shown in (73). (73) a. Sie haben den Peter, einen von den Typen, schwer they have the.acc Peter one.acc of the guys heavily beleidigt. insulted ‘They badly insulted Peter, one of the guys.’ b. Sie haben dem Peter, einem von den Typen, geholfen zu they have the.dat Peter one.dat of the guys helped to flüchten. escape ‘They helped Peter, one of the guys, to escape.’ Moreover, for a language like Hungarian it has been argued by Heringa (2012) that pnaps always exhibit case connectivity, as shown in (75). The same has been argued to hold for Icelandic. (74) a. Megsértették Pétert, az egyik fiút. they have insulted Peter.acc the one boy.acc ‘They insulted Peter, one of the boys.’ b. Segítettek Péternek, az egyik fiúnak, hogy elmeneküljön. they have helped Peter.dat the one boy.dat to escape ‘They helped Peter, one of the boys, to escape.’ Still, even in Hungarian one can find examples of pnaps with nominative despite a different case on the anchor, as shown in the corpus example in (75).

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(75) és például találtam egy könyvet, ami a Bryll Kiadónál and for instance found.1sg a book.acc which the Brill publisher jelent meg Leidenben, egy tudományos könyv … appeared prt Leiden.loc a scientific book.nom (Hungarian National Corpus) ‘I found for example a book that appeared at the Brill publisher in Leiden, a scientific work …’ This additional complication will be addressed in 5, when we introduce a further distinction within the realm of predicational naps, for now it will suffice to see that the kind of question addressed by a nap appears to explain the case connectivity data at least for some of the cases. For the rest of the cases, we will need to ask ourselves what kind of questions might be addressed that share semantic properties with predicational questions and syntactic properties with specificational questions. Under the present approach, projectivity naturally follows from the kind of question that is being addressed by the appositive material. In particular, if the question itself is such that the answer involves embedding under some entailment cancelling operator, projectivity will not arise. Otherwise, it will. Naturally, this means that for pnaps and predicative nrrcs projectivity is predicted to arise in a much more common way since the pqs answered by these constructions do not involve material from the host sentence in the general case. As opposed to this, for snaps and specificational nrrcs, one would expect projectivity to depend on the scope configuration of the anchor, and therefore the wh-expression in the pq addressed by the appositive.26 The main predictions seem to be borne out, as shown in (76). In particular, in both examples we have a nap which appears in a host clause embedded under a possibility operator. Hence, if there is no projection, the inference contributed by the appositive should not survive under embedding. In (76-a), an example for a predicative nap, the inference that Peter is an American is contributed by the nap and is not interacting with the possibility operator, hence one can infer that Peter is an American. The inference contributed by the nap can be said to project. In (76-b), an example of a specificational nap, the inference contributed by the nap is that Peter possibly won the race, as an answer to the question which American possibly won the race. Crucially, this

26

Observe, however, that this account will only work in cases in which an unembedded pq actually can be derived, as discussed in chapter 5.

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appositive cannot answer the question who won the race?, which would give rise to projection. (76) a. Possibly, it was Peter, an American, who won the race. ⊧ Peter is an American. b. Possibly, it was an American, Peter, who won the race. ⊭ Peter won the race. ⊧ Peter possibly won the race.

One final interesting feature of the suggested analysis is that it naturally captures the binding data presented above. Ordinary syntactic binding from the host clause into the appositive cannot take place. However, in cases in which the question and thereby the ellipsis in the answer replicates structure from the host utterance, (apparent) binding may arise.27 I start with the type of binding examples given in Amaral et al. (2007). In example (77), one has to somehow explain how them can appear to be bound by several scientists. (77) Several scientistsi , most of themi linguists, arrived late. The answer is not complicated: Any material in a question can bind into the answer, but not vice versa. (78) a. (i) (ii) b. (i) (ii) c. (i) (ii)

Why did several scientists arrive late? Most of them were tired. Why did several scientists arrive late? Most of them were linguists. What played a role in the fact that several scientists arrived late? Most of them were linguists.

There is a valid point in being worried as to how the binding from question to answer can come about. But this is a technical worry I will not discuss at this point, as the empirical point should be clear enough. In any case, we can at least assume that the binding from questions into elliptic answers may be mediated by the elliptic material of the answer itself. Hence, we would have local binding within the answer.

27

The binding is apparent only in the sense that there is no binding from the host clause into the nap. But of course we have absolutely real binding from elided material in the nap or from the question addressed by the nap into the overt material of the nap.

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But what about the example of Potts (2005) who claims that such binding is actually not possible. Consider the example (79). (79) No reporter1 believes that, as he1 wrote, Ames is a spy. The example is hard to parse, for Potts wanted to construe an example which may not involve E-Type pronouns. Arguably, in downward entailing contexts they are not licensed. Indeed, there is no binding reading in this example. However, this stands in a clear analogy to questions: It is well known that negative quantifiers fail to bind into questions as well, as shown in (80). (80) a. Who did every man kiss? → For every man, who did he kiss? b. Who did no man kiss? ↛ For no man, who did he kiss?

This correctly predicts that any quantifier that can actually bind into a question, can also bind into an appositive. (81) Every mani believes that, as hei wrote, Ames is a spy. In fact the very existence of these contrasts shows that my analysis might be on the right track, since otherwise one would need a theory of appositives that independently explains the very same binding pattern from questions to answers. This is not to be understood as suggesting that the above is—in any sense—a theory of binding. It is just an observation which additionally suggests that appositives and answers to questions seem deeply connected, much in line with the suggested approach.

2.4

Where Indefinites and Appositives Converge

In section 2.2.2, I have mentioned that some theories of wide scope indefinites actually spell out the meaning contribution of the respective indefinite determiners as comments on some concealed question about the identity of the intended referent. Working on German specific indefinites, Ebert et al. (2013) suggest that the respective comments might be conventional implicatures (cis). The obvious reason for this is that cis have been argued by Potts (2005) to invariably take widest scope, i.e. to remain independent of apparently dominating operators. Kagan (2007) has come to conclude that Russian koe- indefinites, similarly contribute cis, which then are responsible for their scope properties and speaker orientation. Crucially, cis have been originally

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introduced to capture a class of meanings that was quite different and mainly contained expressives and appositives, as mentioned above, cf. also Gutzmann (2012a). I have suggested above that the meaning contribution of specialised indefinite determiners is to comment on pqs the indefinites license in discourse. On the other hand, I have identified appositives, one of the most prominent components of the class of cis, as answers to pqs. Moreover, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the meaning contribution of specialised indefinite determiners is not-at-issue, as suggested in (82), which is, again, a similarity to cis. This is, in a way, similar to the strong contextual felicity constraint in the sense of Tonhauser et al. (2013). (82) A: Ali visited a certain city in France. B: No. … it was Madrid that he visited. ?? … you don’t know which city he visited in France. It then seems that the fact that the meaning contribution of indefinite determiners has occasionally been considered a ci deserves more conceptual attention. So, why are comments on ppqs introduced by indefinite determiners so much like cis? The reason seems to be that commenting on questions and answering questions do not seem to be very radically different speech acts. Then, if many cis generally answer pqs and indefinite determiners comment on pqs, one really expects that they share many characteristics. Consider for illustration the following range of reactions to a question. (83) A: Who came to the party? B1 : Mary. B2 : I will tell you later. B3 : I don’t want to tell you. B4 : I don’t know the answer. B5 : I know the answer. It was Mary. B6 : # This question does not make sense. It was Mary. Most strikingly, the B5 answer in (83) combines both the kind of comment on a pq that one would expect for some specific indefinites, and an answer to the same question. This seems to be roughly what (84) seems to encode. At the same time, the infelicity of the B6 answer seems to reflect the infelicity of namely continuation for non-specific indefinites, as suggested by (85).

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(84) A certain woman came to the party, Mary. (85) # Irgendeine Frau schläft, nämlich Anna. irgendein woman sleeps namely Anna ‘Some woman or another is sleeping, nämlich Anna’ Finally, parentheticals may not only contain answers to pqs but also comments on pqs, as in (86). (86) a. A famous actress, though I don’t know which one, was seen with Al yesterday. b. A famous actress, wait, I’ll tell you soon who it was, was seen with Al yesterday. c. Mary, I can tell you who she was in a minute, was seen with Al yesterday. Given that comments to pqs encoded by indefinite determiners seem to be possible in parenthetical constructions as well, and given that they all share the property of being valid reactions to questions, it seems that the difference between the semantic status of specialised indefinite determiners and appositives of various kind is not so radical after all, and that the scholars who suggested to think of the meaning contribution of indefinite determiners in terms of cis were on the right track. However, simply claiming that those meaning contributions are cis because cis appear to have similar semantic properties in terms of scope and speaker orientation is not a comprehensive explanation. The notion of pqs fits in here as the missing explanatory link: The common denominator of these constructions, and therefore of a class of meanings that have been called cis in the literature, is that they address a pq raised by the host utterance. Thereby, addressing can either mean delivering an answer or commenting on the question. In this particular sense this book is not about three entirely independent grammatical phenomena. It rather seems that there is only one phenomenon under investigation, which is grammatical means to raise and address pqs in natural language. The literature has apparently noticed the connection between these phenomena but the notion of pqs allows us to comprehensively explain the connection for the first time.

chapter 3

Questions and Interrogatives—The Basics In order to be able to introduce the notion of pqs at a higher level of formal precision, we will need a preliminary discussion of what we mean by questions and how questions relate to interrogative expressions. I will use inquisitive semantics (Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009, Ciardelli 2009, 2010, Groenendijk 2011, Ciardelli et al. 2013b etc.) as a framework in this book. While most of what I say could, technically, be said without inquisitive semantics as well, e.g. by using the standard Rooth-Hamblin semantics in the version of Beaver & Clark (2008), I prefer inquisitive semantics here because it provides more solid foundations both in a logical and mathematical sense and in a purely conceptual sense. Having said this, this is not a book about inquisitive semantics, hence, the reader will not find extended foundational discussions here. For the purposes of this book, inquisitive semantics is just a tool that I will present at the level of detail needed to use it for the particular purposes of this book. Relevant discussion in a version of inquisitive semantics which is close to the one used here can be found in Roelofsen (2013). Before starting the discussion, there is an important piece of terminology that needs to be clarified. We must have a clear distinction between meanings (i.e. semantic objects) and linguistic expressions (i.e. linguistic objects, strings). For instance, one may reasonably say that the meaning of interrogatives are questions. Hence, a question is not a linguistic expression; it is rather the meaning of a linguistic expression. In particular, as objects of thought, questions are partially independent of their linguistic realisation. Similarly, we may call the meaning of declaratives propositions, or, in order to make their discourse function more transparent, assertions. This terminology is certainly not the only possible one. For instance, Stenius (1967) argues that one must clearly distinguish between semantic objects and communicative acts. According to this view, also defended in Krifka (2011), a semantic object like a proposition must first be processed by some speech act operator in order to actually become an assertion. Questions, then, are simply ambiguous: The semantics of questions deals with the interrogative sentence radicals that occur in root questions or as dependent clauses; the pragmatics of questions is concerned with the various roles that questions serve in communication. krifka (2011) p. 1744

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004217935_004

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In this book, I will not deal with the distinction between speech acts and semantic objects in great detail for the simple reason that I will not consider examples in which unusual speech acts occur, i.e. speech acts in which a proposition ends up being used as a question act or a question, as a semantic object, ends up being used as an assertion or an exclamation or the like. Hence, we will generally not need to consider further distinctions, though one may easily incorporate such a step into the theory. Still, in some cases a speech act operator will be needed and assumed to make some of the claims explicit. In a sense I have little to say about interrogatives. pqs are questions, hence, they are semantic objects and not interrogatives. Interrogatives are generally only used to capture intuitions about pqs when we intend to refer to pqs. In other words, when we say that in a certain situation (1) is a pq, we mean that there is some semantic object described by the interrogative in (1) and that semantic object is a pq. (1) Who did Mary kiss? Of course, if there is a good theory of the semantics of interrogatives, mentioning the interrogative will lead us to the pq intended. Therefore it is reasonable to talk about the semantics of interrogatives in a book about pqs— and in fact this will be part of the topic of this section. But as examples get more complicated, the interface between interrogatives and questions in turn gets more complicated as well, ambiguities and readings of various kinds arise which partly still constitute problems for semantic theory. Keeping in mind that these are problems of the interpretation of interrogatives and not necessarily of questionhood per se, I will not pursue such issues very far. I will keep the level of discussion of the meaning of interrogatives at a reasonably shallow level.

3.1

Main Semantic Approaches to Questions

There are, quite generally, two main approaches to the semantics of interrogatives in the literature, which naturally depend on what one takes a question to be in the first place. The first one is what I call Alternative Semantics, which says that questions denote sets of classical propositions (Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984 or recently Eckardt (2007), Haida (2007), Beaver & Clark (2008)). The other one is the Structured Meanings approach, where questions are said to denote incomplete/unsaturated structured clas-

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sical propositions, as argued by Hausser & Zaefferer (1979), von Stechow & Zimmermann (1984), Ginzburg (1992), Reich (2001, 2002), Krifka (2001, 2004) and many others. There is a sense in which both approaches agree on a very basic intuition, namely that questionhood can be best understood in terms of understanding answers to questions. Given the historic development, this is very understandable, as in the linguistic community there has always been a better understanding of assertions as compared to questions. Hence, reducing questions to their answers in some way or another is a generally sound strategy to break down a new problem onto an old one. But one can push the argument in more conceptual terms as well, as the following quote suggests. This time the conclusion ought to be that one knows the meaning of an interrogative sentence if one knows, given the circumstances, what counts as a true answer to that question. Since, however, this ought to be perfectly general, that is, since one should be supposed to know what would be a true answer in all possible circumstances, this means that the meaning of questions really resides in its answerhood conditions. dekker et al. (2007) p. 6

The essential debate, then, concerns the nature of answers to questions, i.e. given some question, what counts as an answer to it? Consider a simple example as in (2). (2) A: Who danced? B: Mary. Here, one could assume that the answer of B is just the term Mary. But of course, it is essential for the question to admit more than just one possible answer, as it expresses lack of information on the side of the speaker. So, as far as A is concerned, the answer could have been any of the following examples: Mary, Jane, Alex, Peter … Crucially, these answers are not propositions (if they really are just terms), but one certainly does interpret them as propositional in terms of the information they provide as answers to questions. So, Mary in (2) ends up expressing the information that Mary danced. If questions are what makes this possible, the most natural way of thinking about questions appears to be this: Questions are functions from terms to propositions. Put differently, questions are incomplete propositions. Indeed, in Structured Meanings the resulting meaning of a question is an incomplete proposition, i.e. a function

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which yields propositions depending on the arguments, which are restricted to the domain of the wh-word, as roughly shown in (3). (3)

⇝ λσ ∈ DWH . α(σ)

But as readers may have already realised, we are implicitly committed to another view already. We have based our analysis of several grammatical phenomena on the assumption that term answers are in fact elliptic in nature. Then, of course, the proper way to think of (2) is as suggested in (4). And the set of possible answers is rather a set of possible propositions, as suggested in (5), than a function from terms to propositions. (4) A: Who danced? B: Mary danced.

(5) { Mary danced, Peter danced, Jane danced, Alex danced … }

Indeed, in various versions of Alternative Semantics, questions are accordingly treated as simply denoting the set of their possible answers. Again, I just give a general scheme for illustration in (6). (6)

⇝ {α(a), | a ∈ DWH }

The difference is quite fundamental in certain aspects. For instance, under the Alternative Semantics approach, there seems to be no sense in which questions are incomplete. Moreover, there is a very fundamental difference concerning the role questions play when faced with a term answer. While in Structured Meanings approaches, questions tend to be interpreted as the semantic environment which yields a proposition given some term, in Alternative Semantics, the answer denotes a proposition itself, and the question plays no role. If anything, it is the syntactic structure of the interrogative which is needed to complete the elliptic material, given general theories of ellipsis such as Merchant (2004). The two approaches are, nevertheless, very similar, as the schematic representations in (6) and (3) suggest. In fact, the correspondence is fairly simple to formulate. One can always derive the result of the alternative approach from the result of the structured meaning approach, by the functional rule A given

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in (7), but vice versa this is impossible. In other words, we lose information once we proceed to the alternative representation, and therefore the Structured Meanings approach is, in a sense, more powerful.1 (7) Convert Structured Questions into Alternative Questions: A: domain of structured questions → sets A(S) = {S(a) | a is in the domain of S} where S is some structured question denotation. Therefore, the entire discussion between proponents of these two approaches has been structured around the following two possible arguments: proponents of Structured Meanings have attempted to show that alternative meanings cannot capture some facts about questions, i.e. Alternative Semantics is too restrictive, whereas proponents of alternative meanings have tried to show that Structured Meanings over-generate, i.e. Structured Meanings is not restrictive enough. Beaver & Clark (2008) come to conclude that the frameworks are roughly equivalent. I follow them in this assumption here and treat the decision to go for Alternative Semantics in this book as a matter of convenience rather than a matter of theoretical necessity. Part of the reason, however, why I prefer Alternative Semantics is that there is a richer research tradition in this framework, and, in particular, the newly developed theory of Inquisitive Semantics which heavily inspired this book is a further development of Alternative Semantics.

3.2

Questions in Inquisitive Semantics

One of the very basic requirements for a theory of questions is that one can distinguish between questions and assertions in a systematic way. In Structured Meanings, questions are something incomplete, whereas assertions are complete, or in more model theoretic wording: Questions are functions to propositions and assertions are propositions themselves. In Alternative Semantics, e.g. Hamblin (1973) or Karttunen (1977), questions are sets of propositions whereas assertions are simply propositions. One could say, again, that there is a type theoretic difference between questions and assertions. One may welcome this

1 This was known for a long time in the literature, cf. Rooth (1992), Krifka (2006a), Beaver & Clark (2008). Actually showing, however, that the expressive power of Structured Meanings approaches is higher is more complicated and of no further relevance here.

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consequence, as indeed, questions and assertions seem to be different. But if one looks at surface structure, things are more complicated. For instance, assertions may turn into questions by rising intonation only marked with the / sign, as in (8), cf. e.g. Bartels (1999) or Gunlogson (2001). (8) John was dancing/? From a purely theoretical perspective, the situation is even more unpleasant. Consider, for instance, the claim that questions denote a set of propositions while assertions denote a proposition. One possible consequence seems to be that questions are outside the domain of logic, if logic is concerned with propositions. Or, put in simpler terms: What are sets of propositions supposed to be? It seems that once the fundamental notions of semantic theory are connected to the notion of propositions, questions are some kind of dummy representations which only get meaning by virtue of a postulate. For instance, one could postulate that a question is interpreted by the requirement to pick one of the alternatives as an answer. But this is a postulate only and does not seem to have any deeper meaning. In this respect, the distinction made in Structured Meanings theories seems, at least, better founded, because there is a natural connection between questions and their answers in terms of simple functional application. As opposed to purely type theoretic distinctions or distinctions based on simple postulates, in inquisitive semantics a meaningful, content-driven distinction between questions and assertions can be made. The main idea of inquisitive semantics, at least from my perspective, is that it finally provides a unified theory of questions and assertions. The crucial step thereby is to raise the type of assertions to the same semantic type that questions typically are argued to have in Alternative Semantics. To show this, consider first the notion of a classical proposition. A classical proposition is generally thought of as a function from possible worlds to truth values, or—equivalently—the characteristic set of this function, as shown in (9).2 In particular, the sentence Mary danced will denote the set of worlds in which, indeed, Mary danced.

2 As a notational convention I use bold characters for constants and italics for variables. I will generally use first order predicate logic notation with lambda abstraction to refer to model theoretic entities, following the program of direct model theoretic interpretation. Whenever a meta-language is introduced explicitly, conventions may differ.

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(9)

In inquisitive semantics, we will consider propositions as sets of sets of worlds, disregarding the characteristic function approach. We will say that an assertion will denote the set containing the set of those worlds in which the sentence is true, hence the situation in (10).3 (10) Mary danced.

{{w | D(M, w)}}

For questions, not much will change under the inquisitive perspective. Hence, both under the classical view and under the inquisitive view, a question will denote the possible alternative answers in some well-defined sense of compliance to be discussed later. For a simple question such as in (11), the situation is simple. (11) Did Mary dance?

{{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}}

Crucially, now the difference between an assertion such as in (10) and a question such as in (11) does not involve different kind of semantic objects (sets of worlds vs. sets of sets of worlds) but rather, at least at an intuitive level, the differences seem to be a) that the question has more than just one alternative4 and b) that the union of the two question-alternatives covers the entire space of logical possibilities. Let us call sets of sets of worlds propositions. Then, we can say that a proposition is informative whenever the union of its alternatives does not

3 Very soon we will extend this definition by requesting that a proposition not only contains sets of worlds, but also all subsets of the sets it contains. This will be called downward closure. For the time being, we can ignore this aspect. 4 Again, this will get a bit more complicated once we introduce downward closure, but for the moment we can stick to this observation.

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cover the entire logical space, and we can say that a proposition is inquisitive if it has more than one alternative. Then, questions are inquisitive and noninformative, whereas assertions are non-inquisitive but informative. We will define these terms much more exactly in the following. What is important for now, is to see that the difference between questions and assertions boils down to two very intuitive and very clear notions that one might have recurred to even in a pre-theoretical view, if one wanted to clarify the distinction between questions and alternatives: informativeness and inquisitiveness. From now on, we will consider sentential meanings as propositions and propositions will be, unless specified otherwise, sets of sets of worlds. As opposed to this, when we intend to speak about simple sets of worlds, we will either speak of states, possibilities or classical propositions, depending on the context. One somewhat different way of thinking about this step from classical propositions to the inquisitive view on meaning is that meanings are not only essentially connected to truth and entailment as in classical theories, but also to the information exchange potential expressions may have. As a basic starting point, one should take dynamic theories of meaning in which meanings are understood as context change potentials (ccps) as suggested in Heim (1982), Groenendijk & Stokhof (1991) and others. The meaning of expressions then can be understood as a function from context to context. Thereby, a context has generally been some notion of common ground (cg) information in the sense of Stalnaker (1978, 2002), typically modelled as a context set (cs) which is the intersection of all mutually accepted propositions so far, with some additional representation device for discourse referents and potentially further information. This has been a particularly successful approach to presuppositions, cf. e.g. Beaver (2001), and some further linguistic phenomena as summarised e.g. in Kadmon (2001). Under such a view, the ccp of assertions naturally boils down to simple set theoretic intersection. Given a context set c and some new assertion p, where p is a classical proposition, the new context set c′ resulting after update would naturally be c + p ⇝ c ∩ p. For questions, then, the update seems fundamentally different: Updates create some distinct structured entity, a question on its own, though one might want to limit the alternative possibilities to those that did not contradict the former context set c, hence, for some question q, the update would give: c + q ⇝ {a ∩ c | a ∈ q} ∖ ∅. Clearly, the operation + can be functionally incorporated into the very denotation of assertions/questions, but we will not be concerned with this step here. Crucially, under such a view, the updates by assertions and questions yield different types of entities, i.e. sets of worlds vs. sets of sets of worlds. Under the inquisitive perspective,

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however, a context generally includes not only information, but issues as well. Thereby, an issue is informally understood as some kind of request for information. Hence, given a context set c, which is some set of sets of worlds, the operation + can be understood as an algebraic operation, because the output will be, regardless as to whether the second argument is a question or an assertion, again, a context set c′ , a set of sets of worlds, which may or may not incorporate issues. There are various ways to spell out these basic ideas of inquisitive semantics. I will follow Roelofsen (2013) and Ciardelli et al. (2013a) here, who suggest that a proposition is a downward closed set of sets of worlds, i.e. all sub-sets of any set in a proposition will also be parts of that proposition. Then, a proposition will only allow further future discourse continuations which are subsets of itself. This leads to the denotations in (12). (12) a. ⟦ Mary danced. ⟧ = {a | a ⊆ {w | D(M, w)}} b. ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ = {a | a ⊆ {w | D(M, w)} ∨ a ⊆ {w|¬D(M,w)} }

Let us consider these ideas in more technical detail in what follows. We can define the notion of a proposition alongside with some further useful notions following Ciardelli et al. (2013b). We start with the notion of an information state, which is the closest analogy to a classical proposition and we follow a discourse context, informally called context set above. Definition 3.1 (Information States). An information state s is a set of possible worlds, i.e., s ⊆ u�, where u� is the logical space.

Definition 3.2 (Discourse Context). A discourse context c is a non-empty, downward closed set of information states. Note that the denotations in (12) are, technically, discourse contexts as well. Above, we have occasionally needed to distinguish between the pure information in a discourse context and the discourse context itself. To do this, the following definition, still following Ciardelli et al. (2013b), will be useful. Definition 3.3 (The information available in a discourse context). For any discourse context c: 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈c := ⋃ c The definition is exemplified in (13). If one thinks of a proposition as a set partially ordered by the sub-set relation and conceptualises this as a lattice, one

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can say that if there is a join, the informative content is simply the join, as in (13-a). If there is no join, of course, the informative content has to be calculated, as in (13-b) (13) a. Let c := {{w1 , w2 , w3 }, {w1 , w2 }, {w1 , w3 }, {w2 , w3 }, {w1 }, {w2 }, {w3 }, ∅} Then: 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈c = {w1 , w2 , w3 } b. Let c := {{w1 , w2 }, {w1 }, {w2 }, {w3 }, ∅} Then: 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈c = {w1 , w2 , w3 }

Not surprisingly, the definition of a proposition will be exactly the same as the definition of a discourse context. Definition 3.4 (Propositions). A proposition is a non-empty, downward closed set of information states.

The set of all propositions is denoted by Π. Moreover, the operator 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈 applies to any proposition. With these definitions in mind, one can define the discourse update operation simply as set theoretic intersection, i.e. c + p ⇝ c ∩ p.5 This correctly predicts that we will never have a case in which an update with a proposition p will result in a discourse context c′ , such that c′ is not a subset of p. This correctly captures the intuition we started out with, that propositions impose constraints in terms of the subset relation on possible further discourse developments. Given the notion of propositions introduced here, we will be able to define some properties of propositions. As a first observation, one should note that propositions are fully characterised by the maximal states they contain.6 Given any proposition p, we can create ℘(𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈p ), which creates a lattice given the natural ordering by ⊆. Then, 5 Ciardelli et al. (2013b) give a more elaborate definition including a functional implementation of meanings as context change potentials. I will not follow that line here, as it seems to go beyond the purposes of this book. 6 There are some rare cases in which propositions contain sequences of ever weaker states and therefore they have no maximal elements, as discussed in Ciardelli (2010), Roelofsen (2013). In such cases, maximal states will (naturally) fail to characterise the proposition. I will ignore these complications here but note that, generally, if witnesses are introduced into a first order version of inquisitive semantics, the problem can be handled, cf. Groenendijk & Roelofsen (2011).

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the maximal states are those nodes in the lattice which are not dominated by anything. We call the set of maximal states of p the set of alternatives in p7 in analogy to classical Alternative Semantics, then ALTp is defined as: Definition 3.5 (Alternatives in a proposition). ALTp = {a | a ∈ p ∧ ∀b ∈ p → a ⊄ b} where p is a proposition

Consider, as a simple example (14), in which the proposition contains five states, but only two of them qualify as alternatives: (14) ALT{{w1,w2},{w1},{w2},{w3},∅} = {{w1 , w2 }, {w3 }}

The fact that propositions are characterised by their alternatives naturally follows from the fact that one can derive a proposition from their alternatives by applying downward closure, whence the possibility of a more economic notation in (15), where ↓ signals downward closure under sub-sets. Then, the meaning of an interrogative can be given as in (16). Definition 3.6 (Downward closure). Given a set of sets A, the downward closure of A will contain all elements of A and all sub-sets of the elements of A and is noted as: A ↓:= {a | a ⊆ b and b ∈ A} (15) {{w1 , w2 }, {w1 }, {w2 }, {w3 }, ∅} = {{w1 , w2 }, {w3 }} ↓

(16) ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}} ↓

The notion of entailment, the most crucial notion for propositions, is defined below. Given the fact that propositions are downward closed, the notion of entailment is particularly simple and applies both to assertions and questions as we will see below.

7 To avoid a common misunderstanding, it should be noted that we are speaking of Alternatives in propositions here and not alternatives of a proposition. This notion of alternatives is independent of common notions of focus alternatives or scalar alternatives, which are other propositions that one may consider when interpreting some proposition p. Crucially, the notion of alternatives used here involves parts of the respective proposition, similar to the notion of question alternatives.

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Definition 3.7 (Entailment). Given a and b, two propositions, a entails b whenever a is a subset of b. In symbols: a ⊧ b iff a ⊆ b

As informally suggested above, propositions may have two important properties, inquisitiveness and informativeness, which are defined below. Definition 3.8 (Informativeness). A proposition p is informative iff 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈p ≠ u�

Definition 3.9 (Inquisitiveness). A proposition p is inquisitive iff 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈p ∉ p.

Obviously, a question such as the one denoted by the interrogative Did Mary dance? will not be informative, since the information contained in its denotation equals the logical space, but it will be inquisitive, since the least informative state, the upper bound of the lattice determined by its denotation, is missing from the denotation as suggested above. As opposed to this, an assertion such as the one denoted by the declarative Mary danced will be informative but not inquisitive. Having these definitions, we can divide propositions along these dimensions as follows. Definition 3.10 (Classification of propositions). A proposition p is: – – – –

an assertion iff p is informative and p is not inquisitive. a question iff p is not informative and p is inquisitive. a hybrid iff p is informative and p is inquisitive. a tautology iff p is not informative and p is not inquisitive.

The natural counterpart of a tautology is a contradiction, noted as {∅}. But contradictions are, technically speaking, just informative and non-inquisitive propositions, therefore not constituting an own type of propositions. One can define two important operations that navigate between hybrids, questions and assertions. In particular, the first operation is the non-inquisitive closure and the second one is the non-informative closure. Definition 3.11 (Non-Informative Closure). The non-informative closure of a proposition p is written as ?p and defined as ?p := p ∪ ℘(u� ∖ 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈p )

Definition 3.12 (Non-Inquisitive Closure). The non-inquisitive closure of a proposition p is written as !p and defined as !p := ℘(𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈p )

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The non-informative closure of a proposition will always be non-informative because for any p, 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗈? p = u�. Moreover, if p was an assertion, ?p will be the respective polar question, as shown in (17). As opposed to this, applying noninformative closure to a question will be vacuous, as shown in (18). (17) ⟦ Mary danced. ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}} ↓ ?⟦ Mary danced. ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}} ↓ ∪℘(u� ∖ {w | D(M, w)}) = {{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}} ↓= ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ (18) ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}} ↓= ?⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧

The non-inquisitive closure can be best conceptualised in terms of a Hasse diagram such that the missing roof for questions is added, whereas for assertions nothing happens, for they already have a roof, as shown in (20). In (20), it is assumed that we have a totality of 4 possible worlds. Mary danced in w1 and w2 and she did not dance in the other two worlds. (19) a. ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ =

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(20) ⟦ Mary danced ⟧ =!⟦ Mary danced. ⟧ =

This concludes the basic definition of what a question is in the perspective of inquisitive semantics. But anyone who remembers the assumptions that were alluded to in the introductory section when defining the notion of pqs, will wonder whether this will suffice. After all, the notion of questions used there

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involved a distinction between highlighted and non-highlighted alternatives. Indeed, this basic conception of questions will be further refined in several respects in the next section.

3.3

Highlighting

It is commonly assumed that a wh-question should only be asked if the corresponding existential statement is in some sense satisfied in discourse. Hence, one should only ask Who danced? once it is known that someone danced. In the literature, this observation is mainly known under the label existential presupposition of wh-questions. While it is debated that this is a full-blown presupposition, it is beyond doubt that the existential statement is somehow connected to wh-questions. For instance, in the erotetic logics of Wisniewski (1995), questions that have a satisfied existential presupposition are termed sound questions. The main argument of scholars who doubt that the existential inference is indeed a presupposition is that it is very natural to answer the question in (21a) with (21-b). In fact, it is more natural to answer with (21-b) than with (21-c), which would be a natural way to challenge a presupposition. Another argument suggested to me by Jeroen Groenendijk (p.c.) is that one cannot find compelling evidence from presupposition projection showing that wh-questions have an existential presupposition. (21) a. Who laughed? b. Nobody laughed. c. ? Hey, wait a minute, nobody laughed. Scholars like Karttunen (1977), Hintikka (1978) and most recently Haida (2007) have argued that a negative answer to a wh-question is really no answer but a rejection of the question as unsuitable for the discourse state. One strong argument showing that the existential inference may be a presupposition after all is that one cannot answer with a pure existential to a wh-question as shown in (22), cf. Haida (2007). This would be predicted, however, iff the question had no existential presupposition: (22) A: Who laughs? B: ?? Someone laughs.

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There are two main natural ways to approach the problem. One is, of course, to claim that wh-questions do not have an existential presupposition. Then, they simply do not have the denotation generally assumed in Hamblin semantics, which would make them hybrids, but rather denotations that already include the negative alternative as well, whence the denotation in (23). (23) ⟦ Who danced? ⟧ ⇝Inq {{w | D(a, w)} | a ∈ De } ∪ {{w | ∀x. x ∈ De → ¬D(x, w)}} ↓

Under such an approach, the main challenge is to explain why the answer Someone danced is not acceptable. But the situation does not seem entirely hopeless. For instance, one could assume that there was a more direct way to ask whether someone danced, e.g. by uttering (24). Since the speaker asked Who danced?, there might be an implicature that the speaker assumed that the answer to (24) is already known. Then, it is much more likely that the speaker assumes that the answer to (24) is yes than no, since otherwise the question Who danced? would not make any sense as the speaker would already know the answer (namely: Nobody). (24) Did anyone dance? The other main approach is to assume that wh-questions do indeed have an existential presupposition in general, and they must be evaluated in a local context in which the existential presupposition holds true. Of course, the definition of a question must be slightly modified in the sense that questions should not only fail to be informative in an absolute sense but rather they should fail to be informative in the local context in which they can be asked. With this slight modification of the definition of questionhood, the presuppositional account also seems natural. But of course, the question still remains why the presupposition of wh-questions does not seem to pattern with other known presuppositions in terms of projection or challenging. In this book, I follow a different line of attack which takes what I believe to be the best from both options. In particular, I will assume that there may be an asymmetry between question alternatives: some question alternatives can be highlighted. There are several ways of thinking of highlighted alternatives in inquisitive semantics. The idea has been introduced in Roelofsen & van Gool (2010). It has been further elaborated in Farkas & Roelofsen (2015), where it has been shown to be useful in capturing the semantic contribution of polarity particle

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responses, and in Herbstritt (2014), where it has been argued that embedding verbs may also interact with highlighting of alternatives. The notion has been introduced in terms of a distinction between two dimensions of meaning for certain natural language expressions and interrogatives in particular. A regular dimension of meaning can then host the standard alternative states forming a proposition according to whatever may count as a proposition in some particular version of inquisitive semantics, whereas the highlight dimension would only host those alternatives which are special, i.e. the highlighted ones, similar to the distinction between focus alternatives and ordinary meanings in Rooth (1992). Under such a perspective, there is a sense in which highlighting does not distinguish between questions proper but between their mode of presentation, i.e. between meanings of interrogatives. For instance, the two interrogatives in (25) would end up having distinct denotations, but they would nevertheless denote the same question at the level of their ordinary meaning.8 (25) a. ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}} ↓ ⟦ Did Mary dance? ⟧H = {{w | D(M, w)}} b. ⟦ Did Mary not dance? ⟧ = {{w | D(M, w)}, {w | ¬D(M, w)}} ↓ ⟦ Did Mary not dance? ⟧H = {{w | ¬D(M, w)}}

In this book, we will implement the notion of highlighting slightly differently, assuming that highlighting is a constitutive part of a proposition, i.e. we will want the two interrogatives in (25) to actually denote different questions, even though the difference will remain only at some presentational level.9 To this aim we will re-define the notion of a proposition as follows. Definition 3.13 (Propositions with highlighting). A proposition p is a tuple ⟨Ap , ≤pH ⟩, where Ap is a non-empty, downward closed set of information states and ≤pH is an ordering relation over Ap such that for any c, d ∈ Ap , it holds that c