Quexistentials and Focus
Name
ling_a_00441.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1011.76 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2c6aaa24ca8dd6ee975fb8b27cb4ff62
Author(s)
Hengeveld, Kees
Iatridou, Sabine
Roelofsen, Floris
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Linguistic Inquiry
Publisher
MIT Press - Journals
Citation
Hengeveld, Kees, Iatridou, Sabine and Roelofsen, Floris. 2021. "Quexistentials and Focus." Linguistic Inquiry.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Many languages have words that can be interpreted either as question words or as existentials. We call such words quexistentials. It has been claimed in the literature (e.g., Haida 2007) that, across languages, quexistentials are (a) always focused on their interrogative interpretation and (b) never focused on their existential interpretation. We refer to this as the quexistential-focus biconditional. The article makes two contributions. The first is that we offer a possible explanation for one direction of the biconditional: the fact that quexistentials are generally contrastively focused on their interrogative use. We argue that this should be seen as a particular instance of an even more general fact—namely, that interrogative words (quexistential or not) are always contrastively focused—and propose an account for this fact. The second contribution of the article concerns the other direction of the biconditional. We present evidence that, at least at face value, suggests that focus on a quexistential does not necessarily preclude an existential interpretation. Specifically, we show that it is possible for Dutch wat to be interpreted existentially even when it is focused. We attempt to explain this phenomenon.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/LING_A_00441
