Coordinating questions: The scope puzzle

This paper introduces a new puzzle concerning the interaction between questions on the one hand, and conjunction and disjunction on the other. It shows that a conjunction of two polar interrogative clauses is interpreted so that each conjunct involves a polar question operator and the conjunction takes scope over these, whereas a disjunction of two polar interrogative clauses can only be interpreted as involving a single polar question operator scoping over the disjunction. In other words, two full-fledged polar questions each including their own question operator can be conjoined, but cannot be disjoined. We argue that the source of this contrast is semantic (rather than syntactic, pragmatic, or other), and we formulate two general constraints on question meanings which can each account for it. The first, based on Fox (2018), requires that the resolutions of a question are related in a particular way to the cells of the partition that the question induces on the context set. The second requires that the exhaustive interpretation of a consistent resolution of the question is never inconsistent. We leave open which of these two constraints is to be preferred

Event plurality & quantifier scope across clause boundaries

Legend has it that quantifiers cannot scope out of finite clauses. But whileislands for quantifier raising might exist, finite clauses are not that: We identifya novel environment which productively facilitates scoping universal quantifiersout of embedded clauses, involving the manipulation of event structure. With thehelp of the perfect on an embedding verb and certain adverbials that presuppose abuildup towards a result state (by noon, eventually, at long last), embedded universalquantifiers can more readily take extrawide scope. We describe, account for, anddiscuss restrictions to this effect, and conclude that scoping quantifiers out of finiteclauses is not banned by syntactic constraints, although context or processing mightfavor narrow scope readings

Semantic accessibility and interference in pronoun resolution

The general view in syntactic literature is that binding constraints can make antecedents syntactically inaccessible. However, several studies showed that antecedents which are ruled out by syntactic binding constraints still influence online processing of anaphora in some stages, suggesting that a cue-based retrieval mechanism plays a role during anaphora resolution. As in the syntactic literature, in semantic accounts like Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formal constraints are formulated in terms of accessibility of the antecedent. We explore the discourse inaccessibility postulated in DRT by looking at its role in pronoun resolution of inter-sentential anaphoric relations in four off-line and two eye-tracking experiments. The results of the eye-tracking experiments suggest that accessibility has an effect on pronoun resolution from early on. The study quantifies evidence of inaccessible antecedents affecting pronoun resolution and shows that almost all evidence points to the conclusion that discourse-inaccessible antecedents are ruled out for pronoun resolution in processing. The only potential counter-example to this claim is also detected, but remains only as anecdotal evidence even after combining data from both eye-tracking studies. The findings in the study show that accessibility plays a significant role in the processing of pronoun resolution in a way which is potentially challenging for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. The paper argues that discourse accessibility can help expand the theories of retrieval beyond the syntactic and sentence-level domain and provides a window into the study of interference in discourse

The role of focus marking in disjunctive questions: A QUD-based approach

Disjunctive questions are ambiguous: they can either be interpreted as polar questions (PolQs), as open disjunctive questions (OpenQs), or as closed alternative questions (ClosedQ). The goal of this paper is to show that the difference in interpretation between these questions can be derived via effects of focus marking directly. In doing so, the proposal brings out the striking parallel between the prosody of questions with foci/contrastive topics on the one hand and that of alternative questions on the other. Unlike previous approaches, this proposal does not rely on structural differences between AltQs and PolQs derived via ellipsis or syntactic movement. To show how this works out, an account of focus and contrastive topic marking in questions is put forward in which f-marking in questions determines what constitutes a possible answer by signaling what the speaker's QUD is like. By imposing a congruence condition between f-marked questions and their answers that requires answers to resolve the question itself as well as its signaled QUD, we predict the right answerhood conditions for disjunctive questions

comprehending focus / representing contrast

This dissertation aims to show how existing behavioral evidence regarding the processing of focus can be brought more in line with an alternative-based understanding of focus as proposed in theoretical semantics, without loosing sight of the way general comprehension pressures may shape its interpretation. Throughout, I argue that this is possible by studying how the mental representations involved in the processing of focus are incrementally constructed during sentence comprehension. Reading measures obtained in a series of Maze experiments show that comprehenders arrive at a final interpretation of a focus by combining multiple sources of evidence, including lexical, conceptual and world-knowledge, as well as fine-grained linguistic representations that guide the incremental interpretation of focus independently from such general knowledge. These findings allow for a unified understanding of the inconsistent results previously found in the reading of focus, while also explaining how alternatives and discourse context are involved in the prioritization and anticipation of foci. Experiments 1-4 show, first, that the comprehension of focus generally induces a processing cost because reading times on foci are longer than on non-foci. It then shows that this cost is reduced when contrastive alternatives to the focus are mentioned in the preceding context, suggesting that the representation of contrastive alternatives is indeed involved in the comprehension of focus. The presence of focus marking induces a cost that is separable from a cost of interpreting newly introduced information, and that the presence of alternatives provides a reading benefit that is separable from a benefit due to semantic priming. Together, these findings suggest that contrastive alternatives must somehow be involved in the processing of focus, and that its cost cannot be explained in terms of a general cost for new material. Experiments 5-7 investigate how discourse context is used to assign a focus structure to a sentence in incremental sentence comprehension. It shows that the presence of contrasting material in the context is used by comprehenders to assign focus marking to subsequent sentences, suggesting that representations of contextual contrasts are utilized to anticipate the location of an upcoming focus. Again, results indicate that these behavioral effects of focus are separable from effects of newness or the predictability of upcoming material in general. This suggests that it is crucially the fact that comprehenders encode abstract representations of contextual contrasts that gives rise to these behavioral effects of focus, not the presumed communicative importance of foci or unpredictability alone. Finally, experiments 8-10 study what information comprehenders rely on in constructing an alternative set to a focus. This chapter again provides evidence for the claim that abstract linguistic representations of the discourse context are used to either rule in or rule out potential members of the alternative set to a focus. It shows that the deployment of these types of representations is fast, and independent from the use of general conceptual knowledge or the use of domain-general mechanisms such as semantic priming. I thus propose that comprehenders rapidly revisit semantic representations of the discourse context in constructing the alternative set to a focus

Semantic accessibility and interference in pronoun resolution

The general view in syntactic literature is that binding constraints can make antecedents syntactically inaccessible. However, several studies showed that antecedents which are ruled out by syntactic binding constraints still influence online processing of anaphora in some stages, suggesting that a cue-based retrieval mechanism plays a role during anaphora resolution. As in the syntactic literature, in semantic accounts like Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), formal constraints are formulated in terms of accessibility of the antecedent. We explore the discourse inaccessibility postulated in DRT by looking at its role in pronoun resolution of inter-sentential anaphoric relations in four off-line and two eye-tracking experiments. The results of the eye-tracking experiments suggest that accessibility has an effect on pronoun resolution from early on. The study quantifies evidence of inaccessible antecedents affecting pronoun resolution and shows that almost all evidence points to the conclusion that discourse-inaccessible antecedents are ruled out for pronoun resolution in processing. The only potential counter-example to this claim is also detected, but remains only as anecdotal evidence even after combining data from both eye-tracking studies. The findings in the study show that accessibility plays a significant role in the processing of pronoun resolution in a way which is potentially challenging for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. The paper argues that discourse accessibility can help expand the theories of retrieval beyond the syntactic and sentence-level domain and provides a window into the study of interference in discourse