A Structured Witness Approach to Pair-List Answers of wh-Questions with Plural Definites

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2024
Host editors
  • D. Bekki
  • K. Mineshima
  • E. McCready
Book title Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics
Book subtitle 20th International Conference, LENLS20, Osaka, Japan, November 18–20, 2023 : revised selected papers
ISBN
  • 9783031608773
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9783031608780
Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Pages (from-to) 285-306
Number of pages 22
Publisher Cham: Springer
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
[14] shows that wh-questions with plural definites semantically induce pair-list answers contra [17, 30] and proposes an analysis in which plural definites may perform distributive quantification. However, this analysis blurs a boundary between distributive quantifiers and plural definites, making a wrong prediction about the number sensitivity of the pair-list answers of wh-questions with the latter. I propose an alternative in which wh-questions with plural definites may induce pair-list answers without distributive quantification. I offer an implementation with a simple question semantics with Dynamic Plural Logic [1], and its extension with Dynamic Plural Inquisitive Semantics [6, 26].
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60878-0_16
Downloads
978-3-031-60878-0_16 (Final published version)
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