Utku and Aron at PLC 49

Syntactic alternatives in Turkish polar questions.

April 5 and 6, the Penn Linguistics Colloquium takes place for the 49th time, and it will include a talk by six syllables of Maryland syntax and semantics: Utku Turk and Aron Hirsch, presenting their work on "Syntactic alternatives in Turkish polar questions," abstracted below.

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.