Séminaire SynSem avec Valentin Richard

In this talk, I investigate how wh-words, disjunction, and focus trigger presuppositions and inquisitiveness.

In the first part, I address the issue of the existential inference of simplex wh-question (e.g. "Who cheated?" -> "Someone cheated"). This existential inference is weak and unstable. I exhibit pragmatic and semantic environments influencing it, e.g. free-choice-licensing contexts. To explain these phenomena, I suggest that simplex wh-words are semantically ambiguous between a specific and a generic reading. I motivate this theory using focus movement (in Mongolian and Ngamo), similarities with non-interrogative wh-items, and anaphoric properties. This proposal also captures the variations in question types and weak islands.

The second part is dedicated to the study of French interrogative-based conditionals, e.g. "[selon comment vous vous positionnez] vous n'aurez pas tous la même perception". I present the syntactic structure of this construction. I emphasize the diversity of this paradigm of French dependency conditionals. This leads us to a compositional problem regarding inquisitiveness triggering. To solve this issue, I use Dynamic Inquisitive Semantics and Free Association with focus.