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Meaning Meeting - Matthew Ganquan Shi / Forming alternative questions

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Meaning Meeting - Matthew Ganquan Shi / Forming alternative questions

Linguistics | Philosophy Tuesday, April 14, 2026 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm Marie Mount Hall, 1108B

Tuesday April 14, Matthew presents his recent thoughts on "Forming alternative questions," abstracted below. 

My research question starts with this: do alternative questions in Mandarin Chinese have the LF as in (1)? If the answer is negative, then what is the correct LF?

(1) Interrogative disjunction: [CQ … ] or [CQ … ]
(2) Disjunctive interrogative: [CQ [ … or … ]]

One way of analyzing alternative questions is to assume that they are interrogative disjunctions ((1), cf. (2)). In other words, the alternative question is a result of directly disjoining multiple polar questions, and crucially, the type of the disjunctor is <stt, <stt, stt>>.

The LF in (1) has been claimed to be possible for English (Pruitt & Roelofsen, 2011), Turkish (Gračanin-Yuksek, 2014), Japanese (Uegaki, 2014), and Hindi-Urdu (Bhatt & Dayal, 2020), among others. In particular, Uegaki (2014) suggests that (1) is the only possible LF for Japanese. Previous work (Song, 2021) suggests that Uegaki’s diagnostics for Japanese do not apply to Mandarin, so there is no positive evidence against (2). So the picture is not clear.

There are two predictions from (1): (i) two disjuncts are symmetrical, and (ii) the disjunctor is not, in principle, restricted to disjoining polar questions. These predictions, however, are not borne out in Mandarin. In Mandarin, there are two distinct disjunctors huozhe vs. haishi that differ in distribution and two typical question particles ma vs. ne that are sensitive to question types. We observe two complications: (i) asymmetry in question particles in cases that surface like alternative questions, and (ii) selectivity of disjunctors for question types. Maintaining the LF in (1) would have to resolve the two complications, so maybe the answer to my first research question is no.

I will also talk about two alternative hypotheses each differing regarding the semantic type of the disjunctor haishi: (a) <st, <st, stt>> and (b) <t, <t, t>>, and discuss the consequences of each hypothesis, hoping to figure out the answer to the second question.

Add to Calendar 04/14/26 12:30:00 04/14/26 13:45:00 America/New_York Meaning Meeting - Matthew Ganquan Shi / Forming alternative questions

Tuesday April 14, Matthew presents his recent thoughts on "Forming alternative questions," abstracted below. 

My research question starts with this: do alternative questions in Mandarin Chinese have the LF as in (1)? If the answer is negative, then what is the correct LF?

(1) Interrogative disjunction: [CQ … ] or [CQ … ]
(2) Disjunctive interrogative: [CQ [ … or … ]]

One way of analyzing alternative questions is to assume that they are interrogative disjunctions ((1), cf. (2)). In other words, the alternative question is a result of directly disjoining multiple polar questions, and crucially, the type of the disjunctor is <stt, <stt, stt>>.

The LF in (1) has been claimed to be possible for English (Pruitt & Roelofsen, 2011), Turkish (Gračanin-Yuksek, 2014), Japanese (Uegaki, 2014), and Hindi-Urdu (Bhatt & Dayal, 2020), among others. In particular, Uegaki (2014) suggests that (1) is the only possible LF for Japanese. Previous work (Song, 2021) suggests that Uegaki’s diagnostics for Japanese do not apply to Mandarin, so there is no positive evidence against (2). So the picture is not clear.

There are two predictions from (1): (i) two disjuncts are symmetrical, and (ii) the disjunctor is not, in principle, restricted to disjoining polar questions. These predictions, however, are not borne out in Mandarin. In Mandarin, there are two distinct disjunctors huozhe vs. haishi that differ in distribution and two typical question particles ma vs. ne that are sensitive to question types. We observe two complications: (i) asymmetry in question particles in cases that surface like alternative questions, and (ii) selectivity of disjunctors for question types. Maintaining the LF in (1) would have to resolve the two complications, so maybe the answer to my first research question is no.

I will also talk about two alternative hypotheses each differing regarding the semantic type of the disjunctor haishi: (a) <st, <st, stt>> and (b) <t, <t, t>>, and discuss the consequences of each hypothesis, hoping to figure out the answer to the second question.

 Marie Mount Hall false