Haoze Li

Mandarin has a special construction widely known as a ‘wh-conditional’, in which both the antecedent clause and the consequent clause are wh-clauses. Wh-conditionals are of interest to linguists because the wh-expressions in a wh-conditional must co-refer. How to make sense of the fusion of a conditional and two wh-clauses, as well as the nature of the co-reference relation, have been long-standing issues. Two competing approaches have been advanced to shed light on wh-conditionals: the indefinite approach (Cheng and Huang in Nat. Lang. Semant. 4(2):121–163, 1996; Chierchia in J. East Asian Linguist. 9: 1–54, 2000; a.o.), which treats wh-expressions as indefinites that exhibit dynamic potentials, and the question-categorial approach (Xiang in Interpreting questions with non-exhaustive answers, Ph.D. thesis, 2016; Xiang in Linguist. Philos., 2020a; Liu in Varities of alternatives, Ph.D. thesis, 2016; Liu in Varieties of alternatives: Focus particles and wh-expressions in Mandarin, 2017), which treats wh-clauses as questions denoting functions of various types (or categories). Both approaches face nontrivial challenges, but at the same time have unique advantages each. The goal of this paper is to devise an alternative approach that borrows insights from these two approaches but avoids their shortcomings. On the one hand, the proposed analysis treats wh-clauses as questions. On the other hand, it recognizes the dynamic potential of interrogative wh-expressions, i.e., their ability to introduce discourse referents. A wh-conditional is analyzed as quantification over the values of these discourse referents, which creates the impression of co-reference of the wh-expressions involved (via unselective binding). To the extent that the present analysis is on the right track, it extends the application of the dynamic potential of wh-expressions beyond anaphora.

In Beck, focus intervention is used as an argument for reducing Hamblin’s semantics for questions to Rooth’s focus semantics. Drawing on novel empirical evidence from Mandarin and English, we argue that this reduction is unwarranted. Maintaining both Hamblin’s original semantics and Rooth’s focus semantics not only allows for a more adequate account for focus intervention in questions, but also correctly predicts that focus intervention is a very general phenomenon caused by interaction of alternatives in different dimensions.

It is known that a multiple-_wh_ question can inquire about a dependency between _wh_-expressions, termed “_wh_-dependency”, admitting a pair-list answer. In discourse, the dependency can even support a “plural” interpretation of a singular pronoun. Consider _Which_$$^u$$ _girl bought which_$$^{\nu }$$ _book and how much did_ $$she_u$$ _pay for it_$$_{\nu }$$_?_ The multiple-_wh_ question is asking about a dependency between girls and books. In the subsequent question, the dependency is referred to and the resolution of the singular pronouns varies among the girls and the books they bought. While van Rooy (In: Hulstijn and Nijholt (eds.) Modal subordination in questions, Twendial, 1998) and Dotlačil & Roelofsen (Dynamic inquisitive semantics, Amsterdam, 2019) have noticed this phenomenon, it is still understudied. Based on their insights, this paper argues that reference to _wh_-dependencies is facilitated in two types of subordination constructions: quantificational subordination, where reference to _wh_-dependencies is facilitated through quantificational structure, and question subordination, where reference to _wh_-dependencies is facilitated through conjoining questions. Building on Hamblin-Karttunen semantics of questions and Dynamic Plural Logic (DPlL), this paper proposes a dynamic family-of-questions approach to multiple-_wh_ questions. In particular, a multiple-_wh_ question generates a set of sub-questions, i.e., a family of questions, and then the set is transformed into a set of possible pair-list answers. Both encode the relevant _wh_-dependency in a different manner. As a consequence, the dependency encoded in a family of questions is retrievable in question subordination, while the one encoded in a pair-list answer is retrievable in quantificational subordination.

This paper investigates force shift, a phenomenon in which the canonical discourse conventions, or force, associated with a clause type can be overridden to yield polar questions with the help of additional force-indicating devices. Previous studies attribute force shift to the presence of a complex question force component operating on semantic content. Based on utterance particles and particle clusters in Cantonese, we analyze force shift as resulting from compositional operations on force-bearing expressions. We propose that a simplex force, such as assertion or question, denotes unanchored sentence acts, while a force-shifting particle like Cantonese _ho2_ is an anchoring function anchoring a sentence act to the speaker while querying whether or not the addressee can perform the sentence act. The proposed semantics makes predictions about _ho2_’s interactions with addressee-changing operations and imperatives, as well as about a larger family of force shift phenomena.

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as some apples or a quantity of milk, differ from bare noun phrases like apples or milk in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal for -adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial for -adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier all.