Wh-questions are answered with a list of pairs when quantified expressions such as "every professor" interact with wh-phrases. The theory of branching quantification is extended to wh-quantifier interactions to account for the question reading associated with list answers. It is also shown that there are several phenomena which would be better explained when functional variables are incorporate...

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 ...

Based on Baunaz (2011), we distinguish among French wh-words and claim that they are three-way ambiguous: they can involve partitivity, specificity (both are presuppositional) and non-presupposition (where nonpresuppositional means not-specific/not-partitive). In addition to semantic differences, specificity and partitivity are argued to involve different prosody with wh-phrases in-situ. Buildi...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

This study focuses on naturally occurring ambiguous utterances like “Zhōngguóduì shuí yě dǎ-bù-guò” in Mandarin to if/how prosody is used for disambiguation of wh-indeterminates. The results our production suggest that wh-indeterminates are disambiguated prosodically. For the wh-region, interrogative readings distinguished from indefinite by having a longer duration and higher maximum pitch. pr...

Prior work on wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English, and German. This paper extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are discussed in t...