Abstract
We present two novel diagnostics for gauging the exhaustivity level of German wh-interrogatives embedded under the predicates wissen ‘know’ and überraschen ‘surprise’. The readings available in combination with the concessive particle combination SCHON…aber ‘alright…but’ and the Q-adverb teilweise ‘partially’ provide evidence that embedded wh-interrogatives under veridical and distributive wissen ‘know’ have a weakly exhaustive (WE) reading as their basic semantic interpretation [19]. The logically stronger strongly exhaustive (SE) reading is a pragmatic enrichment that can be cancelled by SCHON…aber. In our event-based analysis, know + wh expresses the maximal plurality of sub-events of knowing the individual answers to the question. Under the cognitive-emotive attitude verb überraschen ‘surprise’, which is not obligatorily distributive, wh-interrogatives allow for two types of WE-interpretations, distributive and non-distributive. The SCHON…aber-diagnostic shows the logically stronger distributive WE-reading to be a pragmatic enrichment. In view of (novel) experimental evidence that surprise + wh allows for SE-interpretations, we follow [12] and tentatively analyze surprise + wh as expressing a psychological state caused by a complex situation, or subparts or missing parts thereof.
This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Priority Program SPP 1727 XPRAG.de, Project ‘Exhaustiveness in embedded questions across languages’ (Onea, Zimmermann). We would like to thank the audience at TbiLLC13 as well as two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. All remaining errors are our own.
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Notes
- 1.
The distributivity of wissen ‘know’ is evidenced by the fact that knowledge of who danced in s will entail knowledge of every individual that danced in s: In a situation s with three individuals, Berit, Daniel and Malte, that danced, the truth of (1) entails that Nino knows that Berit danced and that Daniel danced and that Malte danced. By contrast, [24] was the first to show that überraschen ‘surprise’ is non-distributive, as one can be surprised by the composition of a group (e.g., that B and D and M and all danced together) without being surprised at the individual dancers; see §2 for more discussion of the semantics of know and surprise.
- 2.
We focus on WE- and SE-readings in the discussion to come, in which we derive the SE-reading from the WE-reading, which we take to be the semantic basis of any semantic theory of embedded questions. The additional intermediate exhaustive reading (IE) is a strengthened WE-reading with the additional requirement that the subject have no false beliefs about individuals that are not in the extension of the embedded predicate. For (1), this would require that Nino does not (falsely) believe of Paul or Anna that they danced. We have nothing of substance to say about the IE-reading in this paper and will therefore remain silent on how it derives from the WE-reading. [40] derives IE-readings by applying an exhaustivity operator. Alternatively, there may be a no-false belief constraint as part of the semantics of the embedding verb know, which is veridical, i.e. truth-bound, so that the WE-reading with know is indistinguishable from the so-called IE-reading, as proposed by [36, 37] and [22] for other embedding predicates, such as predict. Throughout, we will continue to use the traditional label WE-reading in connection with know and surprise, where it should be understood as (empirically) equivalent to the label IE-reading in the case of know, as in [40] modulo our non-commitment regarding the derivation of IE.
- 3.
How exactly this blocking of implicatures should be modelled is an open question. It seems to us that the presence of SCHON in a sentence is understood by the hearer as a cue suggesting that (a certain type of) implicatures should not be derived in the first place. However, for the purposes of this paper a somewhat weaker formulation would also suffice: SCHON is licit in contexts in which certain types of implicatures are cancelled with an upcoming aber (‘but’) construction. We will use the stronger claim in this paper for explicitness.
- 4.
We assume that K is a primitive knowledge predicate over eventualities.
- 5.
According to [40], neg-raising is the crucial step for deriving the SE-reading from underlying IE. The IE-reading guarantees that for any false alternative p, the subject does not believe p. By neg-raising, now we move from the proposition that the subject does not believe p to the proposition that the subject does in fact believe not p. In other words, neg-raising transforms the non-belief of false alternatives into a positive belief that false alternatives are false.
- 6.
This is reminiscent of [38]’s notion of surprise as being directed at the overall size and constitution of the answer, except that the propositional notion of answer is replaced with a directly observable situation with unexpected subparts or unexpectedly missing subparts.
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Zimmermann, M., Fricke, L., Onea, E. (2022). Embedded Questions are Exhaustive Alright, but…. In: Özgün, A., Zinova, Y. (eds) Language, Logic, and Computation. TbiLLC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13206. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98479-3_9
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