Alternative Questions and Beyond

这个项目关注的是可选问题，例如：“是男孩还是女孩？”通过形式工具、实验方法和跨语言研究相结合，研究了它们的组成、语义特性和语用分布。这一目标分为三个目标。首先，直接扩展第一阶段的目标1，该项目从跨语言的角度研究了备选问题的表面形式如何映射到语义-语用意义。它致力于在不同语言的替代问题中识别循环表面策略——包括韵律、句法和词汇线索——并为它们分配一个统一的意义贡献。其目的是对可选问题进行组合分析，这种分析不仅基于一种语言（通常是英语），而且具有一定的跨语言有效性。其次，该项目研究了替代问句的最终复杂话语意义如何影响它们在话语中的行为，并将它们与极性问句和/或wh问句在三种非规范用法中进行了比较：修辞用法、“重复”用法和具有陈述性句法的问句。在这样做的过程中，替代问题将作为仔细审视话语的镜头：它在讨论问题中的等级组织，支配它的实用主义压力，以及它的动态更新系统。第三，我们将研究替代问题及其极性和wh对应物如何嵌入态度动词，重点关注三个关于回应的谜题。“惊奇”动词（从第一阶段开始），“认识”动词和“承认”动词。目的是识别替代问题和相关问题类型的内部组成成分，这些成分以一种关键的方式与嵌入动词的固有词汇意义相连接。反过来，这将阐明态度动词备受争议的词汇语义。

This project is concerned with alternative questions like e.g. 'Is it a boy or a girl?'. It investigates their composition, semantic properties and pragmatic distribution by combining formal tools, experimental methods and cross-linguistic research. This goal is articulated in three objectives.First, directly extending objective I from the first phase, the project investigates how the surface form of alternative questions is mapped to semantic-pragmatic meaning from a cross-linguistically informed perspective. It strives to identify recurrent surface strategies in alternative questions across different languages –including prosodic, syntactic and lexical cues-- and assign them a unified meaning contribution. The aim is to develop a compositional analysis of alternative questions that is not just based on one language –typically, English-- but has some cross-linguistic validity.Second, the project examines how the final complex utterance meaning of alternative questions impacts their behavior in discourse, comparing them to their polar question and/or wh-question counterparts in three non-canonical uses: rhetorical uses, 'repeat' uses and as questions with declarative syntax. In doing this, alternative questions will serve as a lens to scrutinize discourse: its hierarchical organization in questions-under-discussion, the pragmatic pressures that govern it, and its dynamic update system.Third, we will investigate how alternative questions and their polar and wh-counterparts embed under attitude verbs, focusing on three puzzles concerning resp. ‘surprise‘-verbs (from the first phase), ‘realize‘-verbs and ‘admit‘-verbs. The aim is to identify ingredients in the internal composition of alternative questions and related question types that interface in a crucial way with the inherent lexical meaning of the embedding verb. This, in turn, will shed light on the much debated lexical semantics of attitude verbs.