When-questions and tense in Inquisitive Semantics

Temporal questions with when and their counterparts in other languages display tense restrictions: they are incompatible with the present tense that is interpreted as 'currently ongoing', and English when-questions are incompatible with the present perfect. The existence of tense restrictions is one of the reasons why a theory of the semantics of questions should include an account of tense and aspect. I first propose an explanation of the tense restrictions based on the pragmatics of questions and partial answers. Then, I discuss how tense and aspectual operators can be added to Inquisitive Semantics (Ciardelli, Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2018).

Alternative Semantics

This chapter presents the semantics and pragmatics of prosodic focus in alternative semantics. Half a dozen examples are given of empirical phenomena that are to be covered by the theory. Then a syntax marking the locus, scope, and antecedent for focus is introduced. The syntax is interpreted semantically and pragmatically by a presupposition involving alternatives. The alternative sets that are used in the definition are computed compositionally using a recursive definition. Alternatives are also employed in the semantics of questions, and this ties in with the phenomenon of question-answer congruence, where the position of focus in an answer matches questioned positions in the question. A different semantic interpretation for focus is entailment semantics, which uses a generalized entailment condition in place of a condition involving alternatives. The semantic and pragmatic interpretation for contrastive topic uses an additional layer of alternatives. Independent of focus, alternatives are deployed in the semantics of disjunction and of negative polarity items.

Question-based Models of Information Structure

We present approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of information structure which centre on Questions Under Discussion (QUDs). Questions, explicit or implicit, are seen as structuring discourse, and information structural marking is seen as reflecting that underlying discourse structure. Our presentation of the model is largely cast in terms of extensions of Roberts’s (2012b) analysis, which is itself related to Rooth’s (1985/1992) Alternative Semantics and Hamblin’s (1973) approach to the semantics of questions. We present the model in terms of a range of constraints that relate information structure to discourse structure, notably constraints on the ‘Relevance’ of utterances, on the ‘Congruence’ of answers to questions, and on the ‘Availability’ of discourse antecedents. We discuss the application of the approach to the interpretation of focus and some cases of contrastive topics, to discourse structure, to the interpretation of focus sensitive operators, and to certain cases of presupposition projection.