Speaker: Sherry Yong Chen (MIT)
Title: Resolving scope ambiguity under (negative) degree questions
Date and time: Friday, 11/16, 2-3pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
This talk presents work-in-progress that provides evidence for facilitation effects of certain types of Question under Discussion (QUD) on scope ambiguity resolution. Specifically, when an ambiguous sentence involves a negation and a comparative quantifier (CQP), a negative QUD facilitates access to the inverse scope reading, but only when the non-negated question nucleus is expected to hold in a given context. We discuss our results with references to the ignorance inference of comparative numerals, maximal informativeness, question answer congruence.