Questions and entailment

蕴涵是语义学中的一个基本概念：例如，每个说英语的人都知道‘John阅读战争与和平’就意味着‘John阅读一本书’，这是一个核心的语义事实。此外，蕴涵对于理解负极性项和标量蕴涵等语法现象也很重要。在陈述句中，它们的分布是根据句子的蕴涵性质来预测的(例如Gazdar 1979，Ladusaw 1979)。也就是说，观察到这些现象的出现与特定的蕴涵性质之间有很强的相关性。但在疑问句中也会出现负极性项和标量含义。理解疑问句中这些现象的一个众所周知的问题是，蕴涵是基于陈述句之间的语义关系。因此，例如，我们不清楚约翰是否读过《战争与和平》？以及“约翰有没有读过书？”是通过蕴涵联系在一起的。因此，问题中负极性项和标量蕴涵的确切许可条件并不是很好理解。但这个悬而未决的问题使蕴涵和最初提到的现象之间的因果联系产生了疑问。这个项目以一种新颖的方式解决了关于疑问句中蕴涵敏感现象的长达30年的争论。它通过从两个方面解决这个问题来寻求解决方案：首先，我在Guerzoni&Satherit(2007)工作的基础上，详细研究了蕴涵逆转与问题中的穷举之间的相关性。其次，我在这些见解的基础上发展了一种新的问题语义理论。这一新理论的结果是：(I)问题通过蕴涵联系在一起，(Ii)对问题的强穷尽答案与否定相同地颠倒了蕴涵。换句话说，“约翰读过一本书吗？”这个问题的答案非常详尽。一本是《约翰读过《战争与和平吗？》。这项调查对其他一些重要辩论产生了重大影响。特别是，我预计这一提议的证据将来自五个经验域：(I)反加性和修辞问题，如：“John抬起手指来帮助你吗？”，(Ii)某些问题中标量含义的颠倒和其他问题中的不存在，(Iii)说话者对强穷尽答案的直觉，(Iv)答案中的焦点分布，以及(V)嵌入疑问句及其嵌入谓词的分析。

Entailment is a fundamental notion in semantics: e.g., it is a core semantic fact that every English speaker knows that 'John read War and Peace' entails 'John read a book'. Moreover, entailment is also important for the understanding of grammatical phenomena such as negative polarity items and scalar implicatures. In declarative sentences, their distribution is predictable from the entailment properties of the sentence (e.g. Gazdar 1979, Ladusaw 1979). I.e., a strong correlation between the appearance of these phenomena and specific entailment properties is observed. But negative polarity items and scalar implicatures also occur in questions. A well-known problem for the understanding of these phenomena in questions is that entailment is based on semantic relations between declarative sentences. It is therefore unclear whether, for instance, 'Did John read War & Peace?' and 'Did John read a book?' are related by entailment. As a result the exact licensing conditions of negative polarity items and scalar implicatures in questions are ill-understood. But this open issue has cast into doubt the causal link between entailment and the phenomena mentioned in the first place. This project addresses the 30-year-old debate about entailment-sensitive phenomena in questions in a novel way. It seeks a solution to the problem by addressing it on two fronts: first I study in detail the correlation between entailment reversal and exhaustivity in questions, building on work by Guerzoni & Sharvit (2007). Second I develop a new theory of question semantics based on these insights. This new theory has the consequence that (i) questions are related by entailment, and (ii) the strongly exhaustive answer to a question reverses entailment in the same way as negation. In other words, the strongly exhaustive answer to 'Did John read a book?' entails the one to 'Did John read War & Peace?'. The investigation has significant consequences for a number of other important debates. In particular, I expect evidence for the proposal to come from five empirical domains: (i) anti-additivity and rhetorical questions such as 'Did John lift a finger to help you?', (ii) the reversal of scalar implicatures in certain questions and the absence thereof in others, (iii) speaker's intuitions about the strongly exhaustive answer, (iv) focus-distribution in answers, and finally (v) the analysis of embedded questions and their embedding predicates.