Turkish correlatives in monolingual Turkish and bilingual Turkish-German grammar

Our paper presents an experimental study on multiple correlatives in Turkish. The research questions that guided our study are twofold: (a) What are the presuppositions of multiple correlatives in Turkish? (b) Is there a difference between monolingual Turkish speakers and bilingual Turkish-German speakers with respect to multiple correlatives? Question (a) targets the presuppositions of interrogative-based correlatives. Since the presuppositions of multiple questions are crosslinguistically variable, are the presuppositions of correlatives based on them variable in a parallel way? Question (b) targets crosslinguistic variability in the acceptability of multiple correlatives. While Turkish permits them, German does not. Does this variability affect bilingual speakers’ grammars? Our results indicate that (a) multiple correlatives share the presuppositions of the questions they contain and (b) bilingual speakers’ grammar of correlatives is different from that of monolingual speakers. The paper sheds a new light on crosslinguistic variation in the domain of questions and correlatives and on bilingual grammar

Discourse related readings of scalar particles

This paper offers an analysis of certain uses of the particles noch/still according to which they scope above a speech act operator. This allows us to keep their meaning contribution stable, and requires a framework in which the operators are part of the LF

Reciprocals and Cumulation

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Exceptions in Relational Plurals

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Seuren/Rullmann ambiguities as plural comparisons

This paper reexamines ambiguous comparatives of a kind made famous in Rullmann's (1995) dissertation, e.g. The helicopter was flying less high than a plane can fly. There is some disagreement in the semantic literature regarding whether the ambiguity is limited to less or also shows up in more-comparatives. Accordingly, the analyses suggested differ substantially, ranging from structural to pragmatic. My primary goal is to provide a more solid empirical basis for building semantic theories of the phenomenon. I report the results from a series of questionnaire studies that show (i) that the difference between more- and less-comparatives is not clear cut, and (ii) that we need to make more fine-grained distinctions among less-comparatives. I propose an analysis in terms of plural predication that captures the major effects found in the studies, and I begin to approach the more subtle data points

Presupposition Projection and the Interpretation of which-Questions

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Incrementally Interpreting Presuppositions

Contribution to Linguistic Evidence 202

FictionalAssert and Implicatures

In this paper, we present interdisciplinary work of linguists and literary scholars on the emergence of implicatures in fictional, here particularly lyrical texts. By systematically analysing a small corpus of poems by Emily Dickinson, John Donne, and other poets not discussed here, we show that, due to specific characteristics of the text type, an additional effect of pragmatic interpretation occurs that we call apparent flouting: in poetry, the pragmatic interpretation of the text is achieved in a more complex way than in non-fictional discourse. It requires a speech act operator that is different from Assert (Krifka 1995), which applies to the text as a whole and does not assert its actual truth. Because the pragmatic interpretation of poetry is more complex, cases of ambiguity that put forward several possible readings, for example, are not resolved right away. Rather, all possible readings contribute to the overall meaning of the poem

A Note on Phrasal Comparatives

This paper investigates the various comparative operators that a language might employ and provides arguments for choosing a particular one. In particular, different phrasal comparatives are contrasted. We argue that Schoenfinkelization of the operator matters and reflects different crosslinguistic possibilities