16h00
visioconférence
retour Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique
Émile Enguehard (U. Amsterdam)
Revisiting the representation of polar questions: declarative parallelism and yes/no asymmetry
In this talk, I argue that we need to move towards theories of question semantics where the representation of polar questions shows greater isomorphism to that of declaratives. In particular, polar questions should distinguish their positive and negative continuations at the semantic level, a feature one can call yes/no-asymmetry. This will be motivated in particular on the basis of the parallelism between patterns of presupposition projection and anaphora resolution between coordinated polar questions and coordinated declaratives, which I will show to be a challenge for theories of question semantics that do not exhibit yes/no-asymmetry. I will briefly propose two different approaches that implement this program, one based on trivalent logic, and one based on the dynamic account of indefinites.
