Speaker: Verena Hehl (MIT)
Title: Who would claim that multiple rhetorical wh-questions are real?
Time: Thursday, July 9th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Abstract: I will discuss several puzzling questions regarding the status of multiple wh-questions in the light of rhetoricity. I will provide a first explanation for why multiple wh-questions are, in fact cannot be, rhetorical questions cross-linguistically, building a partition model upon Han (2002) who would predict otherwise. In addition, I will provide and discuss data in which bare wh-elements in Russian function as indefinities in rhetorical questions, although their licensing is not obvious. This is work in progress and feedback from experts of all interfaces, as well as a wide array of native speaker intuitions are greatly appreciated.