Relativized Exhaustivity: mention-some and uniqueness

TY - JOUR

T1 - Relativized Exhaustivity

T2 - mention-some and uniqueness

AU - Xiang, Yimei

N1 - Funding Information: This paper supersedes Chaps. 2 and 3 of my dissertation (Xiang 2016) and the proceedings papers of Amsterdam Colloquium 20 and NELS 46. The analysis, especially the part on resolving the dilemma between uniqueness and mention-some, has been substantially reworked. I thank Gennaro Chierchia, Danny Fox, and C.-T. James Huang for guiding me during the early development of this work, as well as two exceptional reviewers of Natural Language Semantics and the handling editor Clemens Mayr for extremely helpful reviews. I also thank the audiences at the New York Language of Philosophy Workshop, TaLK 2022 at Keio University, and UConn Logic Group for feedback on the recent versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Christine Bartels for her incredible editorial comments, which have greatly reshaped the presentation of this paper. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

PY - 2022/9

Y1 - 2022/9

N2 - Wh-questions with the modal verb can admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the wh-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox in Mention-some interpretations, MIT seminar, 2013) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order wh-trace and (ii) the absence/presence of an anti-exhaustification operator. However, treating MS answers as complete answers in this way contradicts the widely adopted analysis of uniqueness effects in questions of Dayal (Locality in wh quantification: Questions and relative clauses in Hindi, 1996), according to which the uniqueness effects of singular which-phrases arise from an exhaustivity presupposition, namely that a question must have a unique exhaustive true answer. To solve this dilemma, I propose that question interpretations presuppose Relativized Exhaustivity: roughly, the exhaustivity in questions is evaluated relative to the accessible worlds as opposed to the anchor/utterance world. Relativized Exhaustivity preserves the merits of Dayal’s exhaustivity presupposition while permitting MS; moreover, it explains the local-uniqueness effects in modalized singular wh-questions.

AB - Wh-questions with the modal verb can admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the wh-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox in Mention-some interpretations, MIT seminar, 2013) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order wh-trace and (ii) the absence/presence of an anti-exhaustification operator. However, treating MS answers as complete answers in this way contradicts the widely adopted analysis of uniqueness effects in questions of Dayal (Locality in wh quantification: Questions and relative clauses in Hindi, 1996), according to which the uniqueness effects of singular which-phrases arise from an exhaustivity presupposition, namely that a question must have a unique exhaustive true answer. To solve this dilemma, I propose that question interpretations presuppose Relativized Exhaustivity: roughly, the exhaustivity in questions is evaluated relative to the accessible worlds as opposed to the anchor/utterance world. Relativized Exhaustivity preserves the merits of Dayal’s exhaustivity presupposition while permitting MS; moreover, it explains the local-uniqueness effects in modalized singular wh-questions.

KW - Answers

KW - Exclusivity

KW - Exhaustivity

KW - Free choice

KW - Higher-order interpretations

KW - Interrogatives

KW - Mention-some

KW - Modal obviation

KW - Modality

KW - Questions

KW - Uniqueness

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U2 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09197-3

DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-022-09197-3

M3 - Article

SN - 0925-854X

VL - 30

SP - 311

EP - 362

JO - Natural Language Semantics

JF - Natural Language Semantics

IS - 3

ER -