Polarity sensitivity of question embedding: experimental evidence

Attitude predicates can be classified by the kinds of complements they can embed: declaratives, interrogatives or both. However, several authors have claimed that predicates like be certain can only embed interrogatives in specific environments. According to Mayr, these are exactly the environments that license negative polarity items (NPIs). In his analysis, both NPIs and embedded interrogatives are licensed by the same semantic strengthening procedure. If this is right, one would expect a correlation between acceptability of be certain whether and NPIs. The analysis also predicts a contrast between antecedents vs. consequents of conditionals and restrictors vs. scopes of universal quantifiers. This paper tests these predictions experimentally through an acceptability judgment task. We find that judgments for be certain whether do not correlate with judgments on NPIs, which suggests that be certain whether and NPIs are in fact licensed by different mechanisms

Testing the distribution of pair-list questions with quantifiers

Questions with quantifiers such as 'Which book did every student read?' can receive a pair-list reading, but the availability of this reading depends on the quantifier, as well as the environment of the question (matrix or embedded under various predicates), with possible interactions between these factors. The details of these interactions have been a subject of debate in the literature. We tested the acceptability of pair-list readings with 5 quantifiers ('most', 'two', 'no', 'every', and 'fewer than three') in 4 different environments (matrix, 'find out', 'be certain', and 'wonder'). Our results confirm that the availability of pair-list interpretations for questions with quantifiers depends heavily on both the quantifier and the environment in which the question appears, and more specifically that there is a qualitative divide between responsive and rogative predicates, not between intensional and extensional predicates

A Stalnakerian Analysis of Metafictive Statements

Because Stalnaker’s common ground framework is focussed on cooperative information exchange, it is challenging to model fictional discourse. To this end, I develop an extension of Stalnaker’s analysis of assertion that adds a temporary workspace to the common ground. I argue that my framework models metafictive discourse better than competing approaches that are based on adding unofficial common grounds