Project Details
Projekt
Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2017 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 365429913
Theoretical literature offers an ongoing debate about the interpretation of embedded questions, such as "Ms. Smith knows who solved the problem". Under a strong exhaustive reading, the sentence suggests that Ms. Smith has to know the complete list of people who solved the problem, and, moreover, that this list is complete. Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) argue that this is the only available reading, whereas other scholars (e.g. Guerzoni & Sharvit 2007, Uegaki 2015) point out the existence of weaker interpretations. Under a weak exhaustive interpretation, for instance, Ms. Smith would not need to know that the list is complete. The theoretical literature focuses strongly on the various ways in which the respective readings, and only these readings, are derived. The main research question is whether the different readings are semantic in nature, or whether they result from pragmatic inferencing based on various factors, such as the domain of quantification, at-issueness, and utility.The empirical basis of the theoretical discussion is less clear, however. There is only one experimental study (Cremers and Chemla 2016), which tries to elucidate the empirical situation, but this study is limited to two embedding verbs in English. Experimentally controlled data on embedded questions in other languages and with more verbs of embedding are not available. The proposed project attempts to close this research gap by conducting a series of experiments on the interpretation of embedded questions in a wide range of unrelated languages (from Ulster English to Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo)). The questions are embedded under various verbs (e.g. "know", "surprise", "predict", "tell"). They are tested in two independent experimental paradigms against all combinations of readings discussed in the literature: Experimental paradigm I employs a sentence-verification task. Experimental paradigm II employs a felicity-judgment task. The two experimental paradigms complement each other, and they will provide clear evidence as to which exhaustive readings of embedded questions are pragmatic in nature, and what contextual factors affect their derivation. Since the exhaustivity of embedded questions is of fundamental importance for the theoretical discussion of what questions are (e.g. partitions or Hamblin-alternatives), the expected results of the project will have far-reaching theoretical implications. These pertain to all areas in discourse semantics and pragmatics that rely on questions as semantic objects, including e.g. presupposition projection, exhaustification, and the derivation of scalar implicatures.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
International Connection
Austria
