May 30, 2003

Time:

5:00pm, May 30, 2003

Place:

Conference room, 3rd floor, Building 10, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo Komaba campus

Speaker:

Hiroyuki Ura (Kwansei Gakuin University)

Title:

Towards a Syntactically Proper Treatment of Functional Wh-interrogatives

Abstract:

The scopal interpretation of questions with quantifiers have long been debated upon in syntax as well as in semantics. Elaborating an interpretive theory of functional wh-phrases, Chierchia (1992) has laid a cornerstone in the syntacto-semantic analysis of wh/quantifier interactions. Although the basics of his approach have now been widely accepted in the literature, several non-negligible problems with it, both empirical and theoretical, have been brought up as well. By proposing a more fine-grained, theoretically coherent, syntactic mechanism of functional wh-phrases and their movement, this paper attempts to resolve the major empirical problems inherent to Chierchia's (1992) approach all at once, instead of providing an independent adjustment to each of the problems. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to show that the syntactically proper treatment of functional wh-phrases can provide articulate explanations to what are left unexplained with Chierchia's original implementations. In this respect the theory to be presented in this paper can be regarded not as supplanting, but as supplementing Chierchia's (1992) theory of questions with quantifiers.