Relatives interrogatives alternatives
Workshop Relatives, interrogatives, alternatives
Charles University in Prague
13-15 November 2019
Workshop description
In many languages relative clauses bear a formal resemblance to corresponding interrogative clauses, the most striking instance of this being the syncretism between relative and interrogative wh-pronouns (Caponigro 2003; I asked what she ordered vs. I ate what she ordered), largely an areal phenomenon limited to Europe and adjacent regions (Comrie 1998), though apparently wide-spread also in American languages (Caponigro, Torrence, and Zavala in prep). Wh-based relatives and interrogatives are not on a par; evidence from various linguistic areas suggest that relatives are derived from interrogatives and not conversely: [1] Many languages derive relative pronouns by adding morphology to the interrogative wh-base (e.g. Bulgarian koj -> kojto; Rudin 2014), never conversely. [2] While wh-in-situ is common in interrogatives crosslinguistically, there appear to be no wh-in-situ in relatives (modulo correlatives; de Vries 2005). [3] If a language exhibits wh-ex-situ in both interrogatives and relatives, relative pronouns reach positions structurally higher than interrogative ones (e.g. Kenesei 1994). [4] Within a language, the set of relative wh-pronouns is always a subset of the set interrogative wh-pronouns, never conversely (generalized Caponigro's generalization; Caponigro 2003; Simik 2019). [5] Finally, it appears that wh-based relatives diachronically evolved from correlatives (Lehmann 1984, Gisborne & Truswell 2018), which are in turn semantically akin to interrogatives (Demirok 2017, Liu 2018).
The semantic underpinnings of the asymmetric morphosyntactic, paradigmatic, and diachronic relation between relatives and interrogatives are not well understood and standard analyses of interrogatives and relatives provide no immediate handle on the issue. For instance, many current analyses assume that interrogative wh-words denote alternatives, giving rise to the set-of-propositional denotation of interrogatives (Hamblin 1973). And while it is well understood how question alternatives correspond to focus alternatives (Rooth 1985), and hence how questions relate to their answers, it remains unclear how propositional alternatives could be turned into a property - the standardly assumed denotation of relative clauses (see Chierchia & Caponigro 2013 for an isolated attempt).
The workshop Relatives, interrogatives, alternatives aims to address this core puzzle and related morphosyntactic and semantic issues at the interfaces between relatives, interrogatives, and alternatives, such as focus or contrastive topic alternatives. Relevant questions include:
- What is the compositional semantics of relative pronouns? What is the semantic role of relativizers attached to interrogative wh-bases (Bulg. inter. koj -> rel. kojto)?
- What is the semantics of the interrogative wh-base? Which of the existing analyses appear to be most suitable for addressing the puzzle?
- What motivation does wh-movement have in relatives vs. interrogatives? Why should wh-movement be universal in wh-based relative clauses, but parametrized in wh-questions?
- Why are relatives structurally larger than interrogatives? Why is the landing site of relative operators higher than of interrogative ones?
- If wh-words in interrogatives are / correspond to foci in the sense of denoting alternatives (Beck 2006, Truckenbrodt 2012), what are wh-words in relatives? Is there a suitable correspondence to a non-wh grammatical object?
- What can the study of focus or contrastive topic alternatives (or “unalternatives”; Büring 2015) teach us about the puzzle? Is there a correspondence between relative operators and (contrastive) topics?
Invited speakers
Hubert Truckenbrodt (Berlin)
Daniel Büring (Vienna)
Robert Truswell (Edinburgh)
Radek Šimík (Prague)
Hana Strachoňová (Prague/Brno)
Elodie Winckel (Berlin/Paris)
Izabela Jordanoska (Vienna)
Muriel Assmann (Vienna)
Organizer
Radek Šimík
Funding
