Speaker: Danny Fox (MIT)
Title: Trivalent Strong Exhaustivity –towards a uniform semantics for question embedding
Time: Thursday, November 5th, 12:30pm – 1:50pm
Abstract: In this talk I will go over well-known arguments that there are three different interpretive schemas associated with question embedding (weak-exhaustivity, strong-exhaustivity and intermediate-exhaustivity), where each embedding predicate selects for the appropriate schema. Despite these arguments I will propose a uniform semantics based on the assumption that the answer to a question is a trivalent proposition (the denotation of a cleft). The answer will be “strongly exhaustive” but presuppositional, hence Trivalent Strong Exhaustivity. Different results will follow for the different embedding contexts based on independent differences in presupposition projection.
Based on a recent paper that you can read at
https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jc5NmIxN/Question%20Embedding