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International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation

TbiLLC 2015: Logic, Language, and Computation pp 66–88Cite as

A Semantic Account of the Intervention Effects in Chinese Why-Questions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10148))

Abstract

This paper revisits intervention effects in Mandarin Chinese why-questions. I present new data showing that the ability for quantifiers to induce intervention hinges upon their monotonicity and their ability to be interpreted as topics. I then develop a semantic account that correlates topicality with monotone properties. Furthermore, I propose that why-questions in Chinese are idiosyncratic, in that the Chinese equivalent of why directly merges at a high scope position that stays above a propositional argument. Combining the semantic idiosyncrasies of why-questions with the theory of topicality, I conclude that a wide range of intervention phenomena can be accounted for in terms of interpretation failure.

This paper benefits from discussions with Jun Chen and Lihua Xu. I also thank one anonymous reviewer for the abstract of the TbiLLC 2015 conference and conference attendees for their feedback. I am particularly indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for the TbiLLC 2015 Post-Proceedings for their detailed and insightful comments and suggestions for improvement. All the remaining errors are my own.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Beck [5] for a semantic account of intervention in non-why wh-questions, Beck and Kim [6] for a similar account of intervention in alternative questions, and Tomioka [59] for a pragmatic, information structure-based account of intervention effects in non-why constituent questions.

  2. 2.

    The glossing in this paper follows the Leipzig Glossing Rules (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). A list of the abbreviations in this paper is given as follows:

    ACC: accusative; CLF: classifier; COP: copula; DEM: demonstrative; NEG: negative, negation; NOM: nominative; LOC: locative; PASS: passive; PL: plural; POSS: possessive; PRF: perfect; PRS: present; PRT: particle; PST: past; Q: question particle; REL: relativizer; RES: resultative; TOP: topic marker.

  3. 3.

    Based on monotonicity, I treat the Chinese quantifier henshao ren as an equivalent of few people, since both require a less-than-half cardinality reading and are monotone decreasing. Furthermore, I treat shaoshu ren as an equivalent of a few people, as they pattern together as non-monotonic quantifiers with a less-than-half reading. It is also worth noting that a few people/shaoshu ren generally give rise to a non-empty scalar implicature (see Horn [28]), whereas few people/henshao ren generally do not.

  4. 4.

    Consequently, I choose to put a # sign before unacceptable Chinese why-question sentences as well as their English translations to indicate that the examples are odd because the readings they generate are semantically anomalous. However, I still consistently use the term ‘intervention effects’ to refer to the types of phenomena that are already well established in the tradition, without taking this term in its literal sense.

  5. 5.

    On a separate note, the modal obviation effect that is associated with negative islands (cf. Abrusán [1]) is absent in Chinese why-questions. In (ia), I show that adding the modal keyi ‘can/might’ circumvents the negative islands in a how many-question. In (ib), in contrast, I show that adding the same modal fails to improve a why-question.

    figure m

    If the modal obviation effects, as the majority of accounts of negative islands assume, serve as a diagnostic for islandhood in negative contexts, then the contrast in (ia-b) provides additional evidence that the intervention pattern witnessed in why-questions is a different beast.

  6. 6.

    Witness set refers to the plurality determined by the intersection of the restrictor and the nuclear scope. That is, given a quantificational determiner D, one predicate P and another predicate Q, D(P)(Q) gives rise to the witness set W = P \(\cap \) Q [4, 57].

  7. 7.

    In (25a), zhiyou ‘only’ forms a constituent with an NP and assigns focus value to the NP. In (25b), zhi ‘only’ is a focus adverb. The lian + NP + ye/dou construction in (25c) is often assumed to be the Chinese counterpart of the English focus-sensitive even-NP [27, 42, 52]. It seems that lian and ye/dou together contribute to the semantics of the English focus particle even, although the exact nature of the division of labor is still not clear. According to some analyses, lian assigns focus accent to the NP it combines with, and ye/dou is a maximality operator that overtly expresses the alternatives in the focus value [24].

  8. 8.

    For further discussions on Japanese and Korean scrambling and reconstruction, see [14, 26, 51]. For the argument that Chinese does not allow scrambling, see Soh [53].

  9. 9.

    Independently, experimental results show that the monotonicity of a quantifier affects its ability to entail a witness set due to processing reasons [8, 23]. To verify a quantified sentence containing most or more than two, one needs to find positive instances that members within the restrictor set satisfy the most-relation, the more-than-two-relation, etc. In other words, one needs to verify the existence of a witness set. In contrast, for quantified sentences with no, few, or less than two, the verification procedure more often requires drawing a negative inference based on the absence of positive instances (in which case the witness set is empty). Although there is still a paucity of relevant work on this topic, the intuition is that monotone decreasing quantifiers are not an informative way to denote a witness set.

  10. 10.

    We should expect that the topicality constraint thus formulated applies even in the absence of weishenme ‘why’, since the topic position is generally available. This prediction is borne out. As mentioned above, the class of epistemic attitude adverbs such as daodi ‘on earth’ and jiujing ‘frankly/honestly’ take scope above speech act operators. This class of adverbs can be used to identify topic positions, in the absence of weishenme ‘why’, because when a quantified expression precedes this class of adverbs, the quantified expression has to reside outside the speech act of the sentence it occurs with and thus must receive a topical reading rather than a GQ reading. Importantly, as (i) shows, monotone decreasing quantifiers induce intervention when they precede epistemic adverbs even in non-why questions. Intervention is absent for non-decreasing quantifiers.

    figure aj

    It thus seems that we can indeed reduce the ‘intervention’ in why-questions to a broad phenomenon of topicalizability.

  11. 11.

    According to my consultants, if we use a non-partitive form zhishao san-ge shangyuan ‘at least three injured players’, the sentence is still mildly acceptable, but nowhere close to the fine judgments we are getting with the partitive quantified expression in (37). Note that Constant [15, 17] also notices (without suggesting an explanation) that partitive forms of quantifiers more readily license a referential reading than non-partitive forms. At present, I do not know how to account for this, and have to leave an answer to future work.

  12. 12.

    See Rooth [50] for a discussion of how contrastive topic-marked answer is answering a subquestion of a preceding overall question.

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  1. Shanghai Jiaotong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Dawei Jin

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  1. Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Helle Hvid Hansen

  2. Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

    Sarah E. Murray

  3. School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

    Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh

  4. Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Henk Zeevat

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Jin, D. (2017). A Semantic Account of the Intervention Effects in Chinese Why-Questions. In: Hansen, H., Murray, S., Sadrzadeh, M., Zeevat, H. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54332-0_5

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