Theories of knowledge representation and reasoning about knowledge in philosophy are considered from the vantage point of epistemic logic. This logic is primarily a logic of knowing that, and its semantics can be considered an explication of the well-known idea that "information means elimination of uncertainty". A number of other theories are discussed as further developments of epistemic logi...

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

This paper explores two types of interrogative prosody in Yami, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. (Semi-) spontaneous data collected through the Map Task technique [1] were used and acoustic parameters such as pitch accent shapes, boundary tones, pitch range, and speech rate were examined. The results show that all parameters were used to differentiate interrogative prosody in Yami. Th...

In this paper, we develop a new typology of multiple wh-questions with coordinated wh-pronouns. We motivate the existence of three distinct structures for such questions: one mono-clausal and two bi-clausal. We use four kinds of diagnostics to determine which of the three structures is available in a particular language: the availability of both multiple wh-questions and wh-questions with coord...

This study examines the effects of focus prominence production on tonal alignment in Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek. Information focus has been elicited by using a Wh-Question in utterances with varying number of syllable constituents —from twelve syllables to eighteen— following the constituent under focus prominence. The results indicate significant effects of speech variety on the alignmen...

The relationship between wh prosody and wh scope in Tokyo Japanese has been both empirically and theoretically controversial. This paper examines the production and perception of wh prosody in the Fukuoka dialect. Results confirm that the characteristic wh prosodic contour and the relationship between wh prosody and wh scope identified in earlier impressionistic and small-scale empirical studie...

Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ.Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages.Hence,intuitively,an account of Mandar...