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On the Semantics of Embedded Questions Alexandre Cremers

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On the Semantics of Embedded Questions Alexandre Cremers On the semantics of embedded questions Alexandre Cremers To cite this version: Alexandre Cremers. On the semantics of embedded questions. Psychology. Université Paris sciences et lettres, 2016. English. NNT : 2016PSLEE006. tel-01392721 HAL Id: tel-01392721 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01392721 Submitted on 4 Nov 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. ÉCOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIEURE On the semantics of embedded questions Thèse en Sciences du Langage soutenue le 24 mars 2016 Auteur: Directeur: Alexandre CREMERS Emmanuel CHEMLA Jury: Rapporteurs: Maria ALONI Richard BREHENY Floris ROELOFSEN Yael SHARVIT Benjamin SPECTOR Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique École Doctorale 158 Cerveau Cognition Comportement iii Abstract Two important questions arise from the recent literature on embedded ques- tions. First, Heim (1994) proposed that embedded questions are ambiguous be- tween a weakly and strongly exhaustive reading. Spector (2005) recently proposed an intermediate exhaustive reading as well. Second, adverbs of quantity such as ’mostly’ can quantify over answers to an embedded questions (Berman, 1991). An analysis of this phenomena reveals an analogy between embedded questions and plural determiner phrases, and suggests a fine-grained structures for the denota- tion of questions (Lahiri, 2002). The first part of the dissertation consist of three psycholinguistic studies on the exhaustive readings of questions under ‘know’ in English, the acquisition of these readings under ‘savoir’ by French 5-to-6-ear-olds, and the properties of emotive- factive predicates such as ‘surprise’. The second part presents a theory of embed- ded questions built on Klinedinst and Rothschild’s (2011) proposal to derive ex- haustive readings as implicatures, although it differs in the fine-grained structure it adopts for questions denotations in order to account for plurality effects as well. The theory solves problem raised by B. R. George (2013) and makes predictions for a larger range of sentences. Keywords: Questions, Formal semantics, Psycholinguistics, Language acquisi- tion. v Résumé Suivant la proposition de Tarski (1936), la sémantique vériconditionnelle asso- cie à une phrase déclarative des conditions de vérité. Ainsi, comprendre le sens de la phrase “Il pleut”, c’est pouvoir dire après avoir regardé par la fenêtre si elle est vraie ou fausse. Toutefois, ceci ne permet de rendre compte que des phrases déclar- atives, et pas des questions puisqu’aucune situation ne rendra jamais la question “Qui a appelé ce matin ?” vraie ou fausse. Hamblin (1973) propose la première théorie des questions dans le cadre de la sémantique véri-conditionnelle, et pro- pose de leur associer des conditions de résolutions, c’est-à-dire des ensembles de réponses. Comprendre le sens de la question “Qui a appelé ce matin ?” c’est alors savoir que “Jean a appelé” est une réponse possible, tandis que “il pleuvait” n’en est pas une. Très rapidement, l’étude de la sémantique des questions s’est tournée vers les questions enchâssées dans des phrases déclaratives (questions indirectes). En effet, il est beaucoup plus aisé de juger des conditions de vérité d’une phrases déclarative que des conditions de résolution d’une question. Or moyennant des hypothèses sur la sémantique des verbes enchâssant des questions (‘savoir’, ‘ou- blier’. ), on peut relier les conditions de vérité d’une phrase déclarative au sens de la question qu’elle enchâsse. Cette approche, proposée par Karttunen (1977), a donné lieu à une littérature théorique très riche. Dans cette thèse, je m’intéresse à deux questions importantes dans la littéra- ture récente. Premièrement, Groenendijk & Stokhof (1982) ont remarqué que les conditions de vérité prédites par Karttunen pour des questions enchâssées sous ‘savoir’ étaient trop faibles. Depuis, la littérature distingue lectures exhaustives faibles et fortes pour les questions enchâssées (Heim, 1994). Ce débat a été ra- vivé récemment après qu’une lecture exhaustive intermédiaire a été proposée par Spector (2005). Deuxièmement, Berman (1991) a découvert que les adverbes de quantités tels que ‘pour l’essentiel’ pouvait quantifier sur les réponses à une ques- tion enchâssée. L’analyse de ce phénomène a révélé un parallèle entre questions enchâssées et groupes nominaux pluriels et amené à raffiner la structure proposée pour les questions (voir en particulier Lahiri, 2002). La première partie de la thèse est composée de trois études psycholinguis- tiques sur les lectures exhaustives. La première établit l’existence des lectures in- termédiaires et fortes sous le verbe ‘savoir’, sans exclure la possibilité de lectures faibles. La deuxième, portant sur l’acquisition des questions enchâssées, suggère que les enfants commencent par une lecture faible mais acquièrent entre 5 et 6 ans la lecture intermédiaire qui est majoritaire chez les adultes. La troisième étude s’intéresse aux prédicats dits factifs émotifs, à l’origine de nombreux débats dans la littérature, et en particulier au verbe ‘surprendre’. Les résultats confirment cer- taines intuitions, notamment l’incompatibilité de ce verbe avec les questions po- laires, mais établissent l’existence d’une lecture exhaustive forte. La seconde partie de la thèse présente deux théories des questions enchâssées, compatibles avec les résultats expérimentaux de la première partie. La première théorie s’inscrit dans la lignée de Klinedinst & Rothschild (2011) qui proposent de dériver les lectures exhaustives intermédiaires et fortes comme des implicatures, mais se base sur une structure fine pour la dénotation des questions afin de ren- dre compte également des effets de pluralité discutés par Berman (1991) et Lahiri (2002). La théorie ainsi obtenue apporte des solutions aux problèmes soulevés par George (2013) sans nécessiter de redéfinir la dénotation des verbes ‘savoir’ et ‘ou- blier’ et établit des prédictions pour une gamme de phrases plus large que celles vi traitées habituellement. La seconde théorie traite des effets de pluralité avec les verbes dits rogatifs (‘demander’, ‘dépendre’), dans la lignée de Beck & Sharvit (2002). Cette théorie pourrait également être complétée pour dériver les lectures fortes et intermédiaires, suivant les principes proposés dans la première théorie. Mots-clés: Questions, Sémantique formelle, Psycholinguistique, Acquisition du langage. vii Acknowledgements I feel very lucky that this section is so long. Unfortunately, I also probably forgot some people who contributed significantly. I tried to cite everyone only once, but of course many people should be cited in several of the following paragraphs! Each chapter acknowledges specific contributions. I would first like to thank my committee. When I realized that my defense would essentially be a general attack on the theories supported by the members of my committee, I thought that we would have fun. Although everything went much faster than I expected, the discussion was very fruitful and made us realize how far we still are from understanding question embedding. I would particularly like to thank Maria Aloni and Floris Roelofsen who had read my dissertation so carefully and came from Amsterdam with so many clever questions. I am looking forward to working together in the years to come! I have had extensive discussions with Yael Sharvit on many occasion before the defense and her feedback helped me a lot. I will always remember my very first meeting with Yael two years ago, when she managed to understand an early version of my theory within a few hours from a badly written draft, while she had just landed from California and was 9-hours-jet-lagged. I promise I will look more carefully at NPI data one day! I wish to thank Richard Breheny not only for his work as a reviewer, but also for his support throughout the past year. Even though I won’t move to London in the end, I learned a lot from writing all these grant applications together. We had great discussions on various topics in experimental pragmatics, and I’m convinced we will collaborate sooner or later, even without sharing an office! Having Benjamin Spector on my committee was very important to me. He introduced me to formal semantics and pragmatics back in 2008, and he was the first one to show me all these fascinating implicature things. Four years later, he was also the one with the original idea for the Experiment 1 of the first chapter of this dissertation. One thing led to another and I changed my PhD project proposal to work on embedded questions. On any possible topic, Benjamin always has clever original ideas, and no matter what you come up with, he will always suggest something better. The coffees we had together were certainly the most productive. Nathan Klinedinst could not make it for the defense, but I was honored to have him at my ‘pre-defense’ last year and he gave me very useful feedback on this occasion. His paper with Daniel Rothschild had an obvious influence on my own work, and was my starting point when I began theoretical work. I remember very well the day I presented it in a reading group at ENS. I don’t think I can express what a wonderful advisor Emmanuel has been. His advices on any possible topic have been so valuable that I don’t how I will adapt to making any decision without consulting him first. We have worked together on a daily basis for the past 5 years and I can’t remember having any conflict or argument about anything more serious than stats1. He has the amazing ability to always answer any email within an hour, no matter the time of the day or night and even from a jungle in Uganda.
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