Yasutada Sudo

Biased polar questions in English and Japanese

This paper focuses on one particular use-conditional aspect of question meanings: biases associated with different kinds of polar questions (PQs). It commences with a review of Ladd?s dichotomy of positively and negatively biased PQs in English, and claims that although correct, it is not detailed enough to characterize the intricacy of the biases involved in various kinds of PQs in English. Two major types of bias should be recognized, each of which can be positive or negative. A feature-based theory that successfully describes the biases of basic kinds of PQs in English is presented. The paper also presents further empirical support for the proposed system from Japanese PQs, some of which have biases that are not observed with simple forms of PQs in English. It proposes a novel feature-based description system that is fine-grained enough to characterize various flavors of biases that different forms of PQs encode in natural languages. Keywords:biases; English; Japanese; natural languages; polar questions (PQs); use-conditional question meanings

Are Implicit Causality Pronoun Resolution Biases Consistent Across Languages and Cultures

The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across languages should show similar pronoun resolution effects, but these claims run contrary to recent analyses on which much of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is susceptible to cross-cultural variation, and in fact there is little data in the literature to decide the question one way or another. Analysis of data in eight languages representing four historically unrelated language families reveals consistent pronoun resolution biases for emotion verbs, suggesting that the information upon which implicit causality pronoun resolution biases are derived is stable across languages and cultures.

Resolving Temporary Referential Ambiguity Using Presupposed Content

We present the results of two visual-world experiments investigating whether the presupposition of ‘also’ is used to predict upcoming linguistic material during sentence comprehension. We compare predictions generated by ‘also’ to predictions from a parallel inference generated by ‘only’ (i.e., that the upcoming material will be unique). The results show that adults do use the presupposition of ‘also’ incrementally in online sentence comprehension and they can do so within 200 to 500 ms of the onset of the presuppositional trigger. Furthermore, they use it regardless of whether contextual support is explicit or implicit. On the other hand, we did not observe effects of the inference generated by ‘only’ at any point during the sentence, even though this information was used in an offline task.

The Syntax of Monsters

We present novel data showing that indexicals, first and second person pronouns in particular, occurring in a certain kind of attitude report in Uyghur are interpreted with respect to the reported context (indexical shifting). While previous authors report similar shifted interpretations of indexicals in languages such as Amharic and Zazaki, we observe a unique feature of Uyghur indexical shifting: it is sensitive to structural positions of the indexical item, and as a consequence can be partial. We account for the structural sensitivity of Uyghur indexical shifting with a context-shifting operator (or monster) that is syntactically independent from the embedding attitude predicate.

Predicates of relevance and theories of question embedding

Lahiri (2002) classifies question embedding predicates into two major types, rogative and responsive predicates. Rogative predicates like wonder are only compatible with interrogative complements, while responsive predicates like know are also compatible with declarative complements. There are two main theories of responsive predicates: The question-to-proposition reduction approach holds that responsive predicates semantically always select for propositions and that both declarative and interrogative complements to them denote propositions (Heim 1994; Dayal 1996; Lahiri 2002; Spector & Egre 2015). The proposition-to-question reduction approach (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984; Theiler et al. 2015; Uegaki 2015) assumes that responsive predicates semantically always select for question denotations and declarative complements denote resolved questions. We argue that Predicates of Relevance (PoRs) favour the latter approach.

Presupposition projection out of quantified sentences: strengthening, local accommodation and inter-speaker variation

Presupposition projection in quantified sentences is at the center of debates in the presupposition literature. This paper reports on a survey revealing inter-speaker variation regarding which quantifier yields universal inferences--which Q in Q(B)(λx.C(x)p(x)) supports the inference

Do superiority-violating multiple singular which-questions have pair-list readings?

\forall x\in B\colon p(x)

The Semantic Role of Classifiers in Japanese

. We observe an implication that if some yields a universal inference for a speaker, no, and any in a polar question do as well. We propose an account of this implication based on a trivalent theory of presupposition projection together with auxiliary assumptions suggested by [8].

On the semantics of phi features on pronouns

We conducted an online experiment to investigate which hypothesis is correct. The task of our experiment was to judge the felicity of question-answer pairs on a scale of 1 (very unnatural)–5 (very natural). There were 12 critical items, 6 of which involved superiority-obeying questions like (1) and 6 of which involved superiority-violating questions like (2). All of them were paired with a PL answer. They were presented with 6 filler items and 24 items from a separate experiment. The order of presentation was randomized for each participant, except that the first two items were always filler items.

An Experimental Investigation of Presupposition Projection in Conditional Sentences

In obligatory classifier languages like Japanese, numerals cannot directly modify nouns without the help of a classifier. It is standardly considered that this is because nouns in obligatory classifier languages have ‘uncountable denotations’, unlike in non-classifier languages like English, and the function of classifiers is to turn such uncountable denotations into something countable (Chierchia 1998a,b; Krifka 2008, among many others). Contrary to this view, it is argued that what makes Japanese an obligatory classifier language is not the semantics of nouns but the semantics of numerals. Specifically, evidence is presented that numerals in Japanese cannot function as predicates on their own, which is taken as evidence that the extensions of numerals in Japanese are exclusively singular terms. It is then proposed that the semantic function of classifiers is to turn such singular terms into modifiers/predicates. It is furthermore claimed that the singular terms denoted by numerals are abstract entities (cf. Rothstein 2013; Scontras 2014a,b), and proposed that the reason why they cannot have modifier/predicate uses in obligatory classifier languages like Japanese is because the presence of classifiers in the lexicon blocks the use of a type-shifting operator that turns singular terms denoted by numerals into predicates (cf. Chierchia 1998a,b). Classifiers in Japanese 2