Linmin Zhang
2023
Short answers as tests: A post-suppositional view on wh-questions and answers
Linmin Zhang
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary
This paper explores a post-suppositional view on wh-questions and their answers with dynamic semantics. Inspired by Brasoveanu (2013); Charlow (2017); Bumford (2017), I propose a unified treatment of items like modified numerals, focus items, and wh-items: they (i) introduce a discourse referent (dref) in a non-deterministic way and (ii) impose definiteness tests (and additional tests) in a delayed, post-suppositional manner at the sentential / discourse level. Thus, with a question like “who smiled”, the (maximally informative) dref “the one(s) who smiled” is derived. A short answer like “Mary and Max” is considered another post-supposition-like, delayed test, checking whether the dref “the one(s) who smiled” is identical to (or includes) the sum “Mary⊕Max”. I analyze various question-related phenomena to see how far this proposal can go.