Sigrid Beck

QUANTIFIED STRUCTURES AS BARRIERS FOR LF MOVEMENT

In this paper I argue for a restriction on certain types of LF movement, which I call ‘wh-related LF movement’. Evidence comes from a number of wh-in-situ constructions in German, such as the scope-marking construction and multiple questions. For semantic reasons, the in situ element in those constructions has to move at LF to either a position reserved for wh-phrases, or even higher up in the structure. The restriction (the Minimal Quantified Structure Constraint, MQSC) is that an intervening quantified expression blocks this movement. In the case of every, the MQSC leads to an unambiguously distributive interpretation of the question. In the case of all other intervening operators, including negation, it leads to ungrammaticality.

Double Objects Again

In this article, we explore the interaction of the verb again with double object constructions and the corresponding NP+PP constructions. The restitutive reading that again gives rise to in combination with these predicates supports an analysis of double object constructions according to which they contain a small clause with a head predicate HAVE, and an analysis of the corresponding NP+PP constructions that is not transformationally related and varies according to the verb contained in the structures

On wh- and Operator Scope in Korean

This paper presents an analysis of the interaction ofwh-phrases and negation in Korean. We observe that a wh-phrasemust not be c-commanded by negative polarity item. This isrelated to the observation that in German, a wh-phrase must notbe c-commanded by negation or a negative quantifier. We suggestthat both languages are sensitive to a restriction that prohibitsLF movement across negation, the Minimal Negative StructureConstraint MNSC, proposed in Beck (1996). Since a negativepolarity item must always be in the scope of negation, the MNSCcovers the Korean data as well as the German facts. Our analysishas several interesting implications for LF structures in Korean.One is that negation cannot be interpreted in its S-structureposition. Another concerns the semantic effect of scrambling.Contra Saito (1989, 1992), we argue that scrambling serves toidentify intended relative scope and is thus by no means vacuous.We propose that short scrambling is never reconstructed.

A Flexible Approach to Exhaustivity in Questions

A semantics for interrogatives is presented which is based on Karttunens theory, but in a flexible manner incorporates both weak and strong exhaustivity. The paper starts out by considering degree questions, which often require an answer picking out the maximal degree from a certain set. However, in some cases, depending on the semantic properties of the question predicate, reference to the minimal degree is required, or neither specifying the maximum nor the minimum is sufficient. What is needed is an operation which defines the maximally informative answer on the basis of the Karttunen question denotation. Shifting attention to non-degree questions, two notions of answerhood are adopted from work by Heim. The first of these is weakly exhaustive and the second strongly exhaustive. The second notion of answerhood is proven to be equivalent to Groenendijk and Stokhofs interrogative semantics. On the basis of a wide range of empirical data showing that questions often are not interpreted exhaustively, it is argued that a fairly rich system of semantic objects associated with questions is needed to account for the various ways in which questions contribute to the semantics and pragmatics of the utterances in which they appear.

Cumulation is Needed: A Reply to Winter (2000)

Winter (2000) argues that so-called co-distributive or cumulative readings do not involve polyadic quantification (contra proposals by Krifka, Schwarzschild, Sternefeld, and others). Instead, he proposes that all such readings involve a hidden anaphoric dependency or a lexical mechanism. We show that Winters proposal is insufficient for a number of cases of cumulative readings, and that Krifkas and Sternefelds polyadic **-operator is needed in addition to dependent definites. Our arguments come from new observations concerning dependent plurals and clause-boundedness effects with cumulative readings.

The Resultative Parameter and Restitutive Again

Stechow (1995) proposes a special interpretation principle that handles the interpretation of resultative constructions. It introduces a causation relation between two predicates and thereby constructs an accomplishment type predicate syntactically, from an activity (the matrix predicate) and a state (the result predicate). We call this principle (R). Snyder (1995, 2000) argues that the availability of such an interpretation principle is subject to parametric variation. Not all languages permit resultative constructions. This is viewed here as a semantic parameter: lack of a matching interpretation principle renders the constructions uninterpretable, hence ungrammatical.

Pluralities of Questions

This paper proposes a novel semantic analysis of the quantificational variability data discovered by Berman (1991). We suggest that the adverb of quantification in those data quantifies over semantic questions. Its domain is a division of the original question into subquestions, where a legitimate division into subquestions is one in which each member contributes towards the answer to the original question, and together the answers to all subquestions provide the complete answer to the original question. Thus the question itself is associated with a part/whole structure, based on information. We show that there are quantificational variability effects in which the matrix verb is exclusively question-embedding. These data pose a problem for other theories of quantificational variability in questions (specifically Berman 1991 and Lahiri 2002) and motivate our analysis. There are other desirable consequences of our theory, including flexibility in what counts as a subquestion and flexibility in what counts as a complete answer. Beyond quantificational variability, associating questions with a part/whole structure receives independent motivation from questions that occur in collective and cumulative embedded contexts.

Lucinda Driving Too Fast Again-The Scalar Properties of Ambiguous Than-Clauses

This paper presents a systematic empirical investigation of so-called Rullmann Ambiguities (The helicopter was flying less high than a plane can fly). It is shown that many examples constructed after this pattern are in fact unambiguous, and that some but not all examples which replace less with ordinary more/-er are ambiguous. An analysis is proposed which takes into account the inferential properties of the degree predicate in the than-clause plus the way contextual information can be integrated into its meaning. The analysis predicts which Rullmann examples are ambiguous and which are not. Consequences for the analysis of comparatives and for the meaning of adjectives are derived.

Presupposition Processing and Accommodation: An Experiment on wieder (‘again’) and Consequences for Other Triggers

This paper investigates the processing and accommodation of the presuppositions triggered by wieder (‘again’). We conducted a word by word self-paced reading experiment where we presented sentences containing wieder in a context which furnished the relevant presupposition and one which did not. We then additionally asked questions to determine whether people accommodate the presupposition of wieder when it is not explicitly given in the context. The results show that effects due to a missing presupposition arise very early during reading and that there is no accommodation of the presupposition introduced by wieder. On the basis of this, we introduce the interpretation principle minimize accommodation and discuss what implications this brings about for other presupposition triggers. Another interesting result is a late increase in reading times in the condition which verifies the presupposition. We argue that this is due to the referential nature of wieder.

Context-dependent impact of presuppositions on early magnetic brain responses during speech perception

Discourse structure enables us to generate expectations based upon linguistic material that has already been introduced. The present magnetoencephalography (MEG) study addresses auditory perception of test sentences in which discourse coherence was manipulated by using presuppositions (PSP) that either correspond or fail to correspond to items in preceding context sentences with respect to uniqueness and existence. Context violations yielded delayed auditory M50 and enhanced auditory M200 cross-correlation responses to syllable onsets within an analysis window of 1.5s following the PSP trigger words. Furthermore, discourse incoherence yielded suppression of spectral power within an expanded alpha band ranging from 6 to 16Hz. This effect showed a bimodal temporal distribution, being significant in an early time window of 0.0-0.5s following the PSP trigger and a late interval of 2.0-2.5s. These findings indicate anticipatory top-down mechanisms interacting with various aspects of bottom-up processing during speech perception.