Exhaustifying Focus Intervention Effects: A Crosslinguistic Study

Focus Intervention Effects in Questions

Introduction Beck (1996) and Beck & Kim (1997) discuss the interaction between wh-in-situ elements and quantifiers, and propose that an intervening quantifier blocks LF movement of wh-in-situ to an operator position. This “intervention effect” is further discussed by Pesetsky (2000) with reference to LF feature movement. Wh-intervention effects exist in a wide variety of languages (see e.g. Hoj...

Intervention Effects Follow from Focus Interpretation

The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality, of the intervention data. In the system of compositional interpretation that I suggest, wh-phrases play the same role as focused phrases, introducing alternatives into the computation. Unlike focus, wh-phrases make no ord...

Dake-wa : Exhaustifying Assertions

Following the structure meaning approach (c.f. [3,4]), I argued in [5] that the prosodic peak of Contrastive-marking creates a partition of the asserted proposition into B (background) and F (Focus). The morphological wa-marking then introduces the Con operator that takes the structured meaning as its argument and yields a conventional implicature. The Contrastive-marked sentence presupposes th...

Effects of Phonology and Morphology in Children’s Orthographic Systems: A Crosslinguistic Study of Hebrew and Dutch

Evaluating a Crosslinguistic Grammar Resource: A Case Study of Wambaya

This paper evaluates the LinGO Grammar Matrix, a cross-linguistic resource for the development of precision broad coverage grammars, by applying it to the Australian language Wambaya. Despite large typological differences between Wambaya and the languages on which the development of the resource was based, the Grammar Matrix is found to provide a significant jump-start in the creation of the gr...