Alternative Questions and Beyond

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Maribel Romero, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240796339

This project is concerned with alternative questions like e.g. 'Is it a boy or a girl?'. It investigates their composition, semantic properties and pragmatic distribution by combining formal tools, experimental methods and cross-linguistic research. This goal is articulated in three objectives.First, directly extending objective I from the first phase, the project investigates how the surface form of alternative questions is mapped to semantic-pragmatic meaning from a cross-linguistically informed perspective. It strives to identify recurrent surface strategies in alternative questions across different languages –including prosodic, syntactic and lexical cues-- and assign them a unified meaning contribution. The aim is to develop a compositional analysis of alternative questions that is not just based on one language –typically, English-- but has some cross-linguistic validity.Second, the project examines how the final complex utterance meaning of alternative questions impacts their behavior in discourse, comparing them to their polar question and/or wh-question counterparts in three non-canonical uses: rhetorical uses, 'repeat' uses and as questions with declarative syntax. In doing this, alternative questions will serve as a lens to scrutinize discourse: its hierarchical organization in questions-under-discussion, the pragmatic pressures that govern it, and its dynamic update system.Third, we will investigate how alternative questions and their polar and wh-counterparts embed under attitude verbs, focusing on three puzzles concerning resp. ‘surprise‘-verbs (from the first phase), ‘realize‘-verbs and ‘admit‘-verbs. The aim is to identify ingredients in the internal composition of alternative questions and related question types that interface in a crucial way with the inherent lexical meaning of the embedding verb. This, in turn, will shed light on the much debated lexical semantics of attitude verbs.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces (QI)