Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle mica

This paper explores ways in which discourse participants convey an attitude about another discourse participant's conversational move. We examine the semantics/pragmatics of Italian positive and negative polar questions (building on the literature on biased questions) and propose the first fully compositional analysis of the Italian particle 'mica', appearing in negative polar questions and negative assertions. The core is that 'mica' is member of a family of presuppositional, epistemic 'common ground management' operators, leading to a new account of epistemic inferences in biased polar questions that relies on the presuppositional nature of these operators. We argue that 'mica' is a high-left-periphery particle that indicates a presupposed bias against a proposition being added to the common ground, anchored uniformly to the speaker and therefore not showing 'interrogative flip'. The paper develops connections between common-ground management operators and evidentials, arguing that interrogative flip (and lack thereof) is a phenomenon that should be studied for a wide variety of discourse particles. EARLY ACCES

Evidence and Bias: The Case of the Evidential Future in Italian

Evidential markers encode the source of information that an individual (the evidential Origo) has for a proposition. In root declaratives, the Origo is always the speaker (see Korotkova 2016 and references therein). Instead, questions often display interrogative flip: the Origo shifts to the hearer (Garrett 2001; Speas & Tenny 2003, a.o.). While interrogative flip is widely attested across languages, some evidentials have been reported not to flip in questions (see, e.g., San Roque, Floyd & Norcliffe 2017; Bhadra 2017). What determines whether evidentials flip or not? Recent work (Korotkova 2016; Bhadra 2017) has proposed that there is a correlation between lack of flip and bias in questions. This paper contributes to our understanding of the interaction of evidentials and bias by investigating the behaviour of questions with the Italian non-predictive future. We characterize the non-predictive future as an inferential evidential marker (see also Mari 2009; Eckardt & Beltrama forthcoming), and show that lack of flip for the future correlates only with a particular type of bias: a reversal of the default bias associated with negative polar questions (Frana & Rawlins forthcoming). We trace back this pattern to an interaction between the evidential component of the future and the operator that triggers bias reversal

Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer

Every linguist knows how colossal Angelika’s impact on our field is. Hearing aboutthis would not be informative for anybody who might (virtually) pick up this volume, including Angelika herself. So, instead of writing about, say, Angelika’s crucial role in the development of our understanding of modality, we will write about what Angelika means to us, as a teacher, advisor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We know that these words will resonate with many of you (Angelika has meant so much to so many people). We just get to be the lucky ones to tell Angelika publicly.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ak_festsite_schrift/1000/thumbnail.jp

Unconditional concealed questions and Heim's ambiguity

In this paper, we investigate Concealed Questions (CQs) in the context of headed unconditionals. We observe that although CQs are licensed in unconditionals, the distribution of readings involved in Heim's Ambiguity (Heim 1979) does not match that found in attitude contexts. Furthermore, the distribution of readings varies by verb class (epistemic vs. communication verbs). We propose that unconditional concealed questions involve questions derived from the denotation of the DP via a specially devised type-shifter, and show how this can block the unwanted readings in exactly the right cases. Heim's ambiguity, we suggest, is not a unitary phenomenon, and a hybrid concept/question-based account is necessary to derive the right readings in the right contexts

The de re Analysis of Concealed Questions: A Unified Approach to Definite and Indefinite Concealed Questions

The underlined DPs in (1) are known in the literature (Baker 1968, Grimsha

Concealed questions. In search of answers

This dissertation examines the semantic interpretation of various types of DPs in so-called concealed-question (CQ) constructions, as Bill’s phone number in the sentence John knows Bill’s phone number. The peculiar characteristic of DP-CQs is that they are interpreted as having the meaning of an embedded question. So, for instance, the definite Bill’s phone number from the example above can have the same meaning as the embedded question what Bill’s phone number is. Building on previous proposals from Heim (1979) and Romero (2005), I defend the hypothesis that CQs denote individual concepts (IC-approach). The main result of the dissertation is that (a) it provides genuinely new analyses for several types of CQs that seemed problematic for existing analyses, including quantified and indefinite CQs (John knows every book that Mary read this summer/a doctor who can treat your illness ), and (b) it shows that the IC-approach can deliver the right results if we allow quantifier raising and adopt the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995) and Fox’s trace conversion mechanism (Fox 1999, 2002). Chapter 1 introduces initial data on CQs and briefly discusses dissimilarities between concealed questions and their embedded question counterparts. In Chapter 2, I introduce Heim (1979) and Romero (2005)’s analysis of definite - CQs as denoting individual concepts (IC-approach). Following up on Nathan (2006), I show that the IC-approach can be extended to account for CQ-meanings of quantified DP-objects, under the assumption that the NP-CQ is shifted into a predicate of meaningfully sorted individual concepts (an assumption that was not required to account for CQ-meanings of definite descriptions). As discussed extensively in the course of the chapter, the assumption that common nouns must in some cases denote predicates of individual concepts has found independent motivation in the literature (Montague 1973, Nathan 2006, Romero 2007, among others). Therefore, the proposed extension of Heim and Romero’s analysis to the quantified cases is fairly uncontroversial. In Chapter 3, I discuss some problems for the IC-Approach. First, I show that the analysis of quantified CQs laid out in Chapter 2 cannot be extended to quantified CQs with non-relational NPs. Second, I discuss the problematic ambiguity between pair-list readings and set readings (Heim 1979, Roelofsen and Aloni 2008) and propose that such ambiguity should be traced back to the systematic ambiguity between transitive and intransitive meanings of relational nouns. In this way, I argue that the failure of accounting for set readings under the IC-approach is just another symptom of its inability to account for non-relational NP-CQs, and that the two problems should be unified. Finally, I discuss the challenge presented by indefinite CQs with non-relational nouns. In Chapter 4, I propose an amendment to the IC-approach that accounts for the problems presented in Chapter 3. The solution relies on the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995) and Fox’s trace conversion mechanism (Fox 1999, 2002). Overall, The main point of the chapter is to show that once we have an account for quantified CQ-readings with non-relational NPs, all the other challenges can also be taken into account. Finally, I propose that one further amendment is necessary to account for pair-list readings with relational nouns that are not functional