Lexically triggered uniqueness in wh-questions: An argument from Brazilian Portuguese
Filipe Hisao Kobayashi, Vincent Rouillard
January 2022 

Recent discussion on the source of uniqueness in English singular which-questions has debated whether this is due to a general requirement for questions to have a maximally informative true answer (Dayal 1996), or whether uniqueness is lexically triggered by which (Hirsch & Schwarz 2020). We show that Brazilian Portuguese has two kinds of singular which-questions, only one of which presupposes uniqueness. We argue that the distinction between these two kinds of questions is best accounted for under a lexical approach to uniqueness.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006413 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of SALT 31
keywords:	singular wh-interrogatives, brazilian portuguese, uniqueness, higher-order quantification, semantics
Downloaded:	429 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]