Answering overt wh-questions
How similar are Hungarian pre-verbal focus and English it-clefts?
It-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have
been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example,
É. Kiss (1998)
terms them
identificational focus and
Destruel et al. (2015) coin them
inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one
major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt
wh-questions whereas pre-verbal
focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for
this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (
Frank & Goodman 2012) without
assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that
could be used to answer overt
wh-questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic
property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The problem
- 2.1Background
- 2.2Answers to overt wh-questions
- 3.The basic case
- 3.1The framework
- 3.2The semantics
- 3.3Analysis
- 4.Subject–object-asymmetries
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References