Research
seeking to understand how non-local dependencies are modeled and constrained
seeking to understand how non-local dependencies are modeled and constrained
A large part of my past and current research examines the widely-assumed clause-boundedness of quantificational scope, exploring the conditions under which quantifiers can escape finite clause boundaries. My work in this program follows two main trajectories:
Constrained covert movement (Quantifier Raising): Synthesizing empirical evidence from relative clauses and tensed complement clauses in both English and Mandarin Chinese, I argue that the clause-boundedness of QR is not absolute, but rather results from the interaction between (i) independently motivated syntactic and semantic constraints on covert movement and (ii) the syntactic and semantic properties of the clause-embedding configuration.
Exceptional scope and binding across relative clauses: Drawing evidence from Mandarin, I propose that the possibility of long-distance QR across a RC-boundary depends on the structural position of the RC inside the containing DP; in particular, I argue that relative clauses that move to the right edge of the containing DP (e.g. Mandarin pre-demonstrative RCs) facilitate subsequent covert extraction from them, in line with the recent syntactic literature on phase unlocking (Rackowski & Richards 2005; van Urk & Richards 2015, a.o.).
Exceptional scope across tensed complement clauses: Comparing extrawide inverse scope across canonical attitude predicates, e.g. believe and claim, and less-studied ones, e.g. ensure, I argue that the scope-islandhood of a tensed complement CP is affected by its semantic denotation. Under a predicative view of clausal complementation (Kratzer 2006, 2013; Moulton 2009, 2015, a.o.), I propose that unlike canonical attitude verbs, ensure takes a CP complement that denotes a predicate of contentless events and does not introduce modality, and such CPs are transparent to scope-taking across them.
outputs: paper in SALT 34, 2024, dissertation-chapter 3.
Event-based illusory scope: My current research moves towards QR-free approaches to deriving apparent extrawide scope effects across clause boundaries. In particular, I explore to what extent event-semantic frameworks and higher-order pluralities give rise to extrawide scope effects without over-relying on unbounded syntactic movement.
Exceptional scope as an illusion of quantificational subordination (with Haoze Li): Unifying data from temporal adjunct clauses and relative clauses in both Mandarin and English, we propose a non-QR-based analysis implemented in dynamic event semantics, where the exceptional scope and binding effects across syntactic islands arise from discourse-level dependency formations, and argue that such dependency formation is blocked when maximality over events is enforced inside the islands.
outputs: SALT 36 (poster/handout/paper coming soon).
Effect of matrix event structure on exceptional scope effects: Via examining the lexical aspects of clause-embedding predicates, I show that clause-embedding predicates that have been reported to facilitate exceptional scope across their tensed complement CPs, e.g. ensure and prove, are accomplishments, and to account for the attested correlation, I develop a scope-illusion-inspired analysis, which appeals to the incrementality property of accomplishments and an exceptional insertion of an event-based distributivity operator.
outputs: in prep.
This strand of research focuses on the semantics of clause-embedding predicates, as well as the composition of complement CPs with the matrix argument structure. Via case studies of subsets of clause-embedding predicates, e.g. Neg-Raising predicates and ensure-type verbs, I aim to understand what are the semantic contributions of clause-embedding predicates and their complement CPs respectively, and how their semantic properties affect cross-clausal dependencies, e.g. NPI licensing and exceptional scope effects.
Semantics of Neg-Raising predicates & strong NPI licensing (with Setayesh Dashti, Zahra Mirrazi, Hedde Zeijlstra, Manfred Sailer): We show that the semantics of neg-raising predicates, in particular their licensing profile for strong NPIs, provides new evidence that at least some attitude predicates still require a Hitikkan-style semantics where the attitude predicates make reference to universal quantification over possible worlds, challenging fully content-based approaches to clausal complementation.
outputs: poster at UNPAG workshop, 2026
Semantics of "less-attitudinal" clause-embedding predicates--a case study of ensure:
Drawing evidence from modality and actuality entailment, I have argued that under the predicative view of complement clauses (Kratzer 2006, 2013; Moulton 2009, 2015, a.o.), not all complement CPs denote predicates of entities that carry propositional content (cf. Bondarenko 2022, 2025); in particular, those taken by "less attitudinal" predicates, such as ensure/make sure, denote predicates of contentless events.
An ongoing extension investigates the lexical aspects of clause embedding predicates. I show that ensure (along with a few other veridical predicates, e.g. prove and confirm) is one of the few accomplishments among clause-embedding predicates and explore its implications on other semantic properties of clausal complementation, e.g. exceptional scope (see discussion above) and cumulative readings across complement clause boundaries.
outputs: paper in SALT 34, 2024, dissertation-chapter 3 & 4, in prep.
Beyond cross-clausal semantic dependencies, I am also interested in non-local dependencies in morphology and syntax. Through cross-linguistic and quantitative studies, this strand of research asks how non-local morphosyntactic dependencies should be modeled and how they interact with structure and meaning.
The lexical access & representation of non-concatenative morphemes (with Lily Xu, Elizabeth Solá-Llonch and Megha Sundara): With a large-scale meta-analysis (synthesized 229 priming experiments) and Bayesian modeling, we have investigated the mental representation of non-concatenative morphemes in Semitic languages. We have found credible root and template priming effects in Arabic and Hebrew, in nouns as well as verbs, providing quantitative evidence for the psychological reality of non-concatenative morphemes, particularly roots, which cannot be dismissed as an epiphenomenon resulting from overlap in form and meaning.
outputs: paper in Mental Lexicon, 2023
The possibility of (c)overt extraction from Mandarin relative clauses: While exceptional overt extraction from relative clauses have been attested in a wide range of languages, including Mainland Scandinavian languages, English, and Hebrew among others, I show that there is no genuine overt extraction from Mandarin RCs, unlike most other languages examined in literature, and propose an analysis that relates this discrepancy with the relative word order between a RC and the head noun: while all being head-initial languages, Mandarin differs from the other languages that admit exceptional extraction from RCs in that Mandarin RCs are pre-nominal.
outputs: in prep (see also dissertation-chapter 5)
Wang, Huilei. 2025. Quantificational Scope and Clause-(Un)boundedness. PhD thesis, UCLA. [link]
Wang, Huilei. 2024. Semantics of finite complement clauses and scope islandhood. In Proceedings of SALT 34: 334--355. [link]
Wang, Huilei. 2024. Scoping out of relative clauses. In Proceedings of WCCFL 40: 327--337. [link]
Xu, Lily, Elizabeth Solá-Llonch, Huilei Wang, and Megha Sundara.2023. A meta-analytical review of morphological priming in Semitic languages. Mental Lexicon 18(2), 300-337 [link]
Wang, Huilei. 2023. Quantifier Raising out of Mandarin relative clauses. Natural Language Semantics (31): 25--69. [link]
Wang, Huilei. 2022. Interaction of dou and scope effects in Mandarin relative clauses. In Proceedings of SALT 32: 772--792. [link]