Focus and Uninformativity in Yucatec Maya Questions
نویسنده
چکیده
Cross-linguistically, questions frequently make crucial use of morphosyntactic elements which also occur outside of questions. Chief among these are focus, disjunctions, and wh-words with indefinite semantics. This paper provides a compositional account of the semantics of wh-, alternative, and polar questions in Yucatec Maya (YM), which more or less consist solely of these elements. Key to the account is a theory of disjunctions and indefinites (extending work by Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2009), Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), Alonso-Ovalle (2006), and others) which recognizes the inherently inquisitive nature of these elements. While disjunctions and indefinites are inquisitive, they differ from questions since they are also truth-conditionally informative. Compositionally, then, the role of focus in YM questions is to presuppose the informative component of an indefinite wh-word or disjunction, rendering the inquisitive component the question’s only new contribution to the discourse. In addition to deriving question denotations compositionally, the account also captures a potentially surprising fact: focused disjunctions in YM can function as either questions or assertions, depending solely on the discourse context.
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