The unacceptability of wh-question disjunctions can be given a semantic explanation if we take the partition theory of questions as a basis (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982, 1984). According to this theory, a question defines a partition of the logical space. A disjunction of two questions is then a union of two partitions, which is not again a partition: there are overlapping cells. Thus the disj...

In a study of 2,978 Danish children aged 5 years from two suburban counties of Copenhagen, carried out in 1998, the authors compared risk factor profiles for wheeze and recurrent cough without wheeze by using polytomous logistic regression to clarify whether the two conditions are likely to have the same etiology. Data were obtained 1) by a mailed parental questionnaire (International Study of ...

Prosody plays an important role in online sentence processing both explicitly and implicitly. It has been shown that prosodically packaging together parts of a sentence that are interpreted together facilitates processing of the sentence. This applies not only to explicit prosody but also implicit prosody. The present work hypothesizes that a line break in a written text induces an implicit pro...

We suggest a new semantic interpretation of interrogative NPs, based on a novel algebraic theory of the semantics of questions. We discuss the role of interrogative NPs in compositionally deriving the semantics of wh-questions, examine the coordination of interrogative NPs, and apply notions from generalized quantiier theory to their interpretation.

In Greek main sentence stress is located on the rightmost constituent in ‘all new’ declaratives, but for all-new negatives, polar questions, and wh-questions it is located on the negative particle, main verb, and whword respectively. I discuss the implications of this pattern for the focus projection rules and for the accentedness of discourse new constituents.

We propose a typed call-by-name λ-calculus with shift, reset and strict functions and describe its linguistic applications, improving on the previous continuation-based analyses of quantification, binding, raised and in-situ wh-questions, binding in wh-questions, and superiority. The evaluation order is not fixed left-to-right: rather, it is determined by the demand for values exerted by reset ...

It has been known that the ungrammaticality of (1b) is due to the violation of the Superiority Effect (SE) to the effect that WH is not allowed to move over another c-commanding WH (Chomsky 1995) unless the WH is the D-linked (Discourse-linked) phrase like which apple, which carries an implication that there exists a set of entities that can be determined from the context (Pesetky 1987). In oth...