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Meaning Meeting - Utku Türk and Aron Hirsch / Focus and Turkish polar questions

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Meaning Meeting - Utku Türk and Aron Hirsch / Focus and Turkish polar questions

Linguistics | Philosophy Monday, February 17, 2025 11:00 am - 12:15 pm Skinner Building, 1116

Monday February 17, in the Philosophy Department Seminar Room (Skinner 1116), Utku and Aron will review their project on Focus and syntactically conditioned alternatives in Turkish polar questions.

Focus alternatives may be computed as semantic objects (Rooth, 1985, 1992) or as syntactic objects (e.g. Fox & Katzir, 2011). We provide evidence that syntax plays a role based on polar questions in Turkish. There is morphological evidence that the Hamblin set for the polar question is formed via focus alternatives (e.g Atlamaz, 2023). Computing alternatives as semantic objects would over-generate answers in the Hamblin set. On the other hand, the target Hamblin set can be naturally predicted in the syntactic approach, provided that alternatives involve replacing the focus with constituents of the same syntactic category.

Add to Calendar 02/17/25 11:00:00 02/17/25 12:15:00 America/New_York Meaning Meeting - Utku Türk and Aron Hirsch / Focus and Turkish polar questions

Monday February 17, in the Philosophy Department Seminar Room (Skinner 1116), Utku and Aron will review their project on Focus and syntactically conditioned alternatives in Turkish polar questions.

Focus alternatives may be computed as semantic objects (Rooth, 1985, 1992) or as syntactic objects (e.g. Fox & Katzir, 2011). We provide evidence that syntax plays a role based on polar questions in Turkish. There is morphological evidence that the Hamblin set for the polar question is formed via focus alternatives (e.g Atlamaz, 2023). Computing alternatives as semantic objects would over-generate answers in the Hamblin set. On the other hand, the target Hamblin set can be naturally predicted in the syntactic approach, provided that alternatives involve replacing the focus with constituents of the same syntactic category.

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