crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives
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Crosslinguistic semantics of coordinated-wh interrogatives
Neal Whitmannwhitman@ameritech.net
COULD, May 12, 2007
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Asking more than one thing at once
• Multiple wh
• Coordinated wh
• Coordination with sluicing
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Multiple wh
Whom did you see when?
Who sat where?
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Coordinated wh
When and where were you born?
Who or what did this?
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Coordination with sluicing
Who did this, and why?
Where did he go, and when?
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Wh complements
• Multiple wh: Who read what?
• Coordinated wh:
*Who and what read?
• Sluicing: *Who read, and what?
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Complement and adjunct
• Multiple wh: Who saw Elvis where?
• Coordinated wh:
*Who and where saw Elvis?
• Sluicing: Who saw Elvis, and where?
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Wh adjuncts
• Multiple wh:
(?)Where did you see him when?
• Coordinated wh:
Where and when did you see him?
• Sluicing :
Where did you see him, and when?
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In short...
Multiple wh Coordinated wh Sluicing
Complements
(who / what)Yes No No
Mixed
(who / where)Yes No Yes
Adjuncts
(where / when)Yes/?? Yes Yes
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Who read what?
• Single-pair answer:
Kim read The Da Vinci Code.
• Pair-list answer:
Kim read The Da Vinci Code;
Robin read Harry Potter;
and Sandy read Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying.
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Who saw Elvis when?
#Who killed him when?
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Where did you see him when?
#Where were you born when?
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SP, PL, or both?
Multiple wh Coordinated wh Sluicing
Complements
(who / what)SP or PL No No
Mixed
(who / where)PL No SP or PL
Adjuncts
(where / when)PL SP or PL SP or PL
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Hungarian
Multiple wh Coordinated wh
Complements PL SP
Mixed PL SP
Adjuncts PL SP
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Russian
Multiple wh Coordinated wh
Complements PL SP
Mixed No SP
Adjuncts No SP
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MWh, CWh, and Q-inference
SPanswers
SPanswers
PLanswers
MWh questions’ denotation, by Q-inference
CWh questions’ denotation
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Languages surveyed• Chinese• Czech• English• (Estonian)• German• Greek• Hebrew• Hindi
• Hungarian• Japanese• Korean• Macedonian• Russian• Spanish• (Tagalog)• (Vietnamese)
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24 questions
I. Who/what1. Who read what?
2. What did who read?
3. *Who and what read?
4. *What and who read?
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24 questionsII. Who/where
1. Who saw her where?2. Where did who see her?3. *Who and where saw her?4. *Where and who saw her?5. Whom did she see where?6. Where did she see whom?7. * Whom and where did she see?8. *Where and whom did she see?
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24 questions
III. Who/when1. Who saw her when?2. When did who see her?3. *Who and when saw her?4. *When and who saw her?5. Whom did she see when?6. When did she see whom?7. * Whom and when did she see?8. *When and whom did she see?
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24 questions
IV. Who/when1. Where will she sing when?
2. When will she sing where?
3. Where and when will she sing?
4. When and where will she sing?
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MWh/CWh overlapfor who/what
• Chinese III• Czech• Greek III• Hungarian
• Korean II• Macedonian II• Russian I, II, III• Spanish IV
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MWh/CWh overlapfor who/where or who/when
• Chinese I, III• Czech• Greek II, III• Hungarian
• Korean II• Macedonian II• Russian II, III• Spanish IV
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MWh/CWh overlapfor where/when
• Chinese I, III• Czech• English I• German I, II
• Greek III• Hebrew II• Hungarian• Korean II, III
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Conclusion
• The hypothesis is not supported.• It may be true for some languages, but not
for all.• It needs fuller investigation with
coordination plus sluicing.• Some languages have SP/PL segregation,
but in the opposite direction.• In some languages, SP vs. PL is related to
interpretive superiority.
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Acknowledgments
• Thank you to all the native speaker informants who have provided translations and syntactic and semantic judgments for this project:Ben Chudnovsky, Ilija Doneski, Anna Feldman, Calixto Gonzales, Betya Goykhman, Patti Green, Jirka Hana, Hyeon-Seok Kang, Soyoung Kang, Yusuke Kubota, Sun-Hee Lee, Ilse Lehiste, Dmitry Levinson, Anikó Lipták, Xiaofei Lu, Arantxa Martín-Lozano, Detmar Meurers, Bettina Migge, Mineharu "JJ" Nakayama, Roberto Orci, Panayiotis Pappas, Mike Puchovich, Hongqi Rouzer, Jane Rubin-Kurtzmann, Le Nhan Thanh, Giorgos Tserdanelis, Shravan Vasishth, Amanda Whitman, Ellen Whitman, Philip Whitman, and Niina Zhang.
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The Coordinated-Wh Project
http://literalmindedlinguistics.com/Coord_Wh/home.html
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ReferencesOnly those reference that were directly cited in this talk are listed here. For a fuller bibliography on coordinated-wh questions, see the website for the Coordinated-Wh Project.
Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications (GURT ’84), ed. by D. Schiffrin, 11-43.
Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kazenin, Konstantin I. (ed.) 2002. On Coordination of WH-Phrases in Russian. Tuebingen.
Lipták, Anikó. 2003. Conjoined Questions in Hungarian. Multiple-Wh Fronting, ed. by Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes Grohmann. 141-60. Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
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