Speaker: Vlad Orlov (MIT)
Title: Observations on the Existential Uses of Interrogative Pronouns in Russian
Time: Wednesday, April 14th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Title: Observations on the Existential Uses of Interrogative Pronouns in Russian
Time: Wednesday, April 14th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Some of the interrogative pronouns in Russian can be used as indefinites in certain environments, which makes them quexistentials in the terminology of Hengeveld et al. 2023. The interrogative use (InterQ) can be disambiguated from the indefinite (IndefQ) by the obligatory F-marking on the pronoun in the former case:
(1) Kto prixodil?
who.Q came?
i) WhoF came? (InterQ)
ii) Did someone comeF? (IndefQ)
who.Q came?
i) WhoF came? (InterQ)
ii) Did someone comeF? (IndefQ)
Previous research (Yanovich 2005) have treated quexistentials as Hamblin pronouns, which require licensing by an alternative quantifier or approached IndefQ as Polarity Items (Hengeveld et al. 2019). In the talk, I will present a set of data on the interaction of IndefQ with scopal and presuppositional operators, which is problematic for both approaches. Instead, I will argue for a novel generalization that requires ignorance about existence of a witness of the existential statement as the licensing condition for IndefQ.