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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.