Questions and entailment

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Clemens Steiner-Mayr
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228934092

Entailment is a fundamental notion in semantics: e.g., it is a core semantic fact that every English speaker knows that 'John read War and Peace' entails 'John read a book'. Moreover, entailment is also important for the understanding of grammatical phenomena such as negative polarity items and scalar implicatures. In declarative sentences, their distribution is predictable from the entailment properties of the sentence (e.g. Gazdar 1979, Ladusaw 1979). I.e., a strong correlation between the appearance of these phenomena and specific entailment properties is observed. But negative polarity items and scalar implicatures also occur in questions. A well-known problem for the understanding of these phenomena in questions is that entailment is based on semantic relations between declarative sentences. It is therefore unclear whether, for instance, 'Did John read War & Peace?' and 'Did John read a book?' are related by entailment. As a result the exact licensing conditions of negative polarity items and scalar implicatures in questions are ill-understood. But this open issue has cast into doubt the causal link between entailment and the phenomena mentioned in the first place. This project addresses the 30-year-old debate about entailment-sensitive phenomena in questions in a novel way. It seeks a solution to the problem by addressing it on two fronts: first I study in detail the correlation between entailment reversal and exhaustivity in questions, building on work by Guerzoni & Sharvit (2007). Second I develop a new theory of question semantics based on these insights. This new theory has the consequence that (i) questions are related by entailment, and (ii) the strongly exhaustive answer to a question reverses entailment in the same way as negation. In other words, the strongly exhaustive answer to 'Did John read a book?' entails the one to 'Did John read War & Peace?'. The investigation has significant consequences for a number of other important debates. In particular, I expect evidence for the proposal to come from five empirical domains: (i) anti-additivity and rhetorical questions such as 'Did John lift a finger to help you?', (ii) the reversal of scalar implicatures in certain questions and the absence thereof in others, (iii) speaker's intuitions about the strongly exhaustive answer, (iv) focus-distribution in answers, and finally (v) the analysis of embedded questions and their embedding predicates.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants