Seminar on questions: semantic and computational issues

Wednesdays 9:50-12:50 at 18 Seminary Pl (College Ave campus)

Course email list: semantics-2006-questions at rams.rutgers.edu

Sep 6: Introduction and background

• Background on questions
• Getting started with Haskell
• Haskell code (for use with Hugs or GHC) for Karttunen's question semantics: Finite.hs, Pretty.hs, Karttunen1.hs, Karttunen2.hs.

Sep 13: Questions as sets of propositions

• Lauri Karttunen. 1977. Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 1(1):3-44.

Sep 27: Questions as partitions

• Jeroen A. G. Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof. 1989. Type-shifting rules and the semantics of interrogatives. In Properties, types and meaning. Volume 2: Semantic issues, ed. Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara Hall Partee, and Raymond Turner, 21-68. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Handout on types and Haskell
• Haskell code from class

Oct 4: Wrap up loose ends in background

• Simon L. Peyton Jones. 2000. Tackling the Awkward Squad. Presented at the 2000 Marktoberdorf Summer School. Please read Sections 2.2-2.4.
• Handout on monads

Oct 11: List and functional questions: background

• Gennaro Chierchia. 1993. Questions with quantifiers. Natural Language Semantics 1(2):181-234.
• Veneeta Dayal. 1996. Locality in Wh Quantification: Questions and Relative Clauses in Hindi, chap. 4 (Long-distance list answers), 89-150. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Please read Section 2.
• Handout on functional and pair-list questions (we didn't get to this in class, which is just fine)

Oct 18: List and functional questions: weak crossover

• Handout on quantification, questions, and binding
• Haskell code for combining wh-questioning and quantification as two side effects

Oct 25: List and functional questions: binding

• Handout
• Pauline Jacobson. 2002. Direct compositionality and variable-free semantics: The case of binding into heads. In Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory XII, ed. Brendan Jackson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• (This paper gives more background on the previous paper, if you would like some. It is accessible online from within or via Rutgers.) Pauline Jacobson. 1999. Towards a variable-free semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 22(2):117-184.

Nov 1: Wrap up loose ends on list and functional questions

• Handout on dependent types (we didn't get to this in class, which is just fine)

Nov 8: Discourse linking

• David Pesetsky. 1987. Wh-in-situ: Movement and unselective binding. In The representation of (in)definiteness, ed. Eric J. Reuland and Alice G. B. ter Meulen, chap. 5, 98-129. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Nov 15: Superiority and weak islands

• Ileana Comorovski. 1996. Interrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface, chap. 4-6. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Nov 22: No class (Thanksgiving recess)

Nov 29: Concealed questions (Sam Cumming)

1. A generals paper by Lance Nathan. This is the only required reading—it is all relevant background to what I plan to discuss (except possibly the details he gives of previous accounts, though it is always good to know about these).
2. Nathan-lite, a handout with most of the data from [1].
3. A recent SALT paper; take a look at the (v. short) sec 7.2.
4. Extra-curricular reading, Romero's SALT paper (with a nice summary table at the end).
5. More extra-curricular reading; this time only sec. 5 is relevant.