UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Expressing Ignorance With

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Expressing ignorance with determiner phrases A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics by Maayan Abenina-Adar 2020 © Copyright by Maayan Abenina-Adar 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Expressing ignorance with determiner phrases by Maayan Abenina-Adar Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2020 Professor Dylan Thomas Bumford, Co-Chair Professor Yael Sharvit, Co-Chair Natural languages provide pairs of determiner phrases that are in some sense equivalent but that contrast in the ignorance inferences that they license. English provides the- and whatever-DPs – as in the book she is holding vs. whatever book she is holding – and a- and some N or other-DPs – as in a book vs. some book or other. Similarly contrasting pairs are found in Spanish, Ger- man, Japanese, Hebrew, etc. This dissertation considers two hypotheses about the grammatical difference between the members of these pairs. The first is that the ignorance-implying members encode the concept of ‘unsettled’ or ‘unknown’, and the second is that they encode a disjunction of contextually-determined identifying properties, with the assumption that pragmatic principles are obeyed producing ignorance inferences. Examining the meaning contribution of occurrences of these expressions in the scope of quantificational operators, the second hypothesis is found to be more empirically adequate. Various theories about the linguistically-privileged ways of knowing something or someone’s identity are reviewed and their applicability to the analysis of these determiner phrases is considered. Overall, this dissertation draws connections between previously dis- tinct streams of empirical and theoretical work in the semantics of determiner phrases; it advances a new, unified account of ignorance-implying, ‘epistemic’ indefinites – previously analyzed as encoding (something like) a disjunction identifying properties – and ignorance-implying definites like whatever-DPs – previously regarded as encoding the concept of ‘unsettled’ or ‘unknown’. ii The dissertation of Maayan Abenina-Adar is approved. Timothy Hunter Jessica L. Rett Bernhard Schwarz Dylan Thomas Bumford, Committee Co-Chair Yael Sharvit, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2020 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: vi Vita ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: viii 1 Introduction ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 1 1.1 Pairs of (in)definite determiner phrases . .4 1.2 Where does ignorance come from? . .7 1.3 Summary of dissertation . 10 1.4 Background on the framework . 12 1.4.1 Semantic composition . 12 1.4.2 Presuppositions and beliefs . 18 1.4.3 Assumptions about pragmatics . 24 2 Whatever-DPs and the distribution of ignorance requirements :::::::::::: 27 2.1 Assumptions about definiteness . 29 2.1.1 Uniqueness and homogeneity . 29 2.1.2 Syntax-semantics of definites . 32 2.1.3 Sources of contextual restriction effects . 34 2.2 The modal account . 42 2.2.1 Such that I am not certain what it is ..................... 48 2.3 The alternative-based account . 54 2.3.1 Three notes on whatever-DPs’ alternatives . 57 2.3.2 Infelicity by Maximize Presupposition violation . 61 2.4 Challenges for the modal account . 64 iv 2.5 Two other accounts . 77 2.5.1 The unconditional account . 78 2.5.2 The postsuppositional account . 91 2.6 Other applications of the alternative-based account . 92 3 Comparison with some ‘epistemic indefinites’ ::::::::::::::::::::: 99 3.1 Epistemic indefinites . 100 3.2 The modal account . 104 3.3 The alternative-based account . 113 3.3.1 Excursus on clausal disjunction . 120 3.4 Challenges for the modal account . 128 3.5 Previous accounts of epistemic indefinites . 137 3.5.1 Previous Gricean accounts . 137 3.5.2 The dynamic, conceptual cover account . 146 3.6 Conclusion . 148 4 Constraining methods of identification :::::::::::::::::::::::: 152 4.1 Identification with whatever-DPs and postcopular interrogatives . 154 4.2 Identification in WH-interrogatives . 159 4.3 The distinguished status of ostension . 166 4.4 Conclusion . 171 References :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: 172 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Getting to this point has been one of the most significant and rewarding experiences of my life, and I want to thank the people who contributed to it. I thank my committee co-chairs, Dylan and Yael. Dylan set me on the track of my dissertation, and I benefited greatly from his comprehensive knowledge of (in)definiteness, his ability to impart difficult concepts clearly and vividly, and his entertaining constructive criticism. From the very first course that I took with Yael, I was convinced that she is unable to say something boring about semantics. I admire her talent, curiosity, and competence, and I feel lucky to have found such a good teacher, mentor, collaborator, and friend. I also thank my committee members, Tim, Jessica, and Bernhard. Meetings with Tim were fun and helpful, and his computational linguistics course in my fourth year gave me new appreciation for what I had studied in other linguistics courses. Jessica’s feedback on all of my work at UCLA has significantly shaped my approach to linguistics; I admire Jessica’s eye for intriguing phenomena and her creativity and persuasiveness in linguistic analysis. I asked Bernhard to serve as the external member of my committee because of the lasting impression made on me by his seminar on scalar particles at McGill in Winter 2012. His lucid, interesting, and thorough feedback on my work has always stimulated new thoughts. I thank all of my earlier mentors and teachers, especially Tim Stowell, Luka Crnic,ˇ Lisa Travis, Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Elizabeth Cowper. Each of them played an important role in introducing me to the field of linguistics, and I feel very lucky to have been able to learn from them. I also thank Maggie Rogow, whose Latin and Greek classes made me think about language analytically for the first time. I thank all of my fellow linguistics graduate students, especially Nikos Angelopoulos, Viiu Wichman, Iara Mantenuto, James Collins, Travis Major, Margit Bowler, John Gluckman, Meng Yang, Deborah Wong, Brice Roberts, Adam Royer, Jesse Zymet, Henrison Hsieh, Sozen¨ Ozkan, Ezer Rasin, Patrick Elliott, Richard Stockwell, Connor Mayer, Bethany Sturman, Justin Royer, Maura O’Leary, Marju Kaps, and Madeleine Booth. All of them have been great colleagues, collaborators, and friends; they taught me a lot and kept it fun. vi I thank my friends from back home in Toronto, especially Edvard Bruun, Yamini Coen, and Dylan Glynn. Edvard has always been lolz and will always be lolz. Yamini is interesting, smart, and fun, and catching up with her is always great. I had a couple memorable summers with Dylan in the middle of my program that made us friends, and I’m thankful for it. I thank Michelle Yuan, who is a member of almost all of the mentioned groups, since she has been a mentor/teacher, a fellow linguistics graduate student, and a friend from back home. She has always been an endless source of laughs and insights. Among the many reasons that I am happy to have studied linguistics is that I got to spend more time with her; it has been to die for. Finally, I thank my family: my siblings Aviv and Nadine, my parents Josie and Alon, and my partner Oshri. Their constant love, support, and company sustained me while I wrote this work. My parents played an especially important role in making this possible by teaching me in their languages when I was a child and by supporting and encouraging me throughout my education. I dedicate this work to them. vii VITA 2008–2012 Honours BA, Linguistics specialist and Latin minor, University of Toronto 2012–2014 MA, Linguistics, McGill University 2014–2020 PhD candidate, Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles PUBLICATIONS Abenina-Adar, Maayan & Sharvit, Yael. forthcoming. On the presuppositional strength of inter- rogative clauses. Natural Language Semantics. Abenina-Adar, Maayan & Yael Sharvit. 2020. Alternative interrogatives and Negative Polarity Items. Snippets 38, 1-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.7358/snip-2020-038-aash. Abenina-Adar, Maayan. 2020. Interesting interrogatives. In Michael Franke, Nikola Kompa, Mingya Liu, Jutta L. Mueller, & Juliane Schwab (eds.) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB), vol. 24, 1–16. Abenina-Adar, Maayan. 2019. Surprising. In Richard Stockwell, Maura O’Leary, Zhongshi Xu, & Z.L. Zhou (eds.) Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), vol. 36, 41-47. Abenina-Adar, Maayan. 2019. Know whether and ever free-relative clauses. Semantics and Prag- matics 12(19). 1–46. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.19. viii Abenina-Adar, Maayan & Nikos Angelopoulos. 2016. On root modality and thematic relations in Tagalog and English. In Mary Moroney, Carol-Rose Little, Jacob Collard, & Dan Burgdorf (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT), vol. 26, 775–794. Coon, Jessica & Maayan Abenina-Adar. 2013. Ergativity. In Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Bibli- ographies in Linguistics, New York: Oxford University Press. ix 1 Introduction Language affords us many ways to express our ignorance. We can use an expression whose gram- matically derived meaning implies something about its user’s belief state. (1) is an obvious exam- ple. Speaker ignorance regarding what city Kim is in can be inferred from the literal meaning of (1), which is determined by the meanings of its parts and its syntactic composition. (1) I am not certain what city Kim is in We can also express our ignorance with language less directly, as B does in (2). (2)A: What city is Kim in? B: Kim is in North America It would be natural to infer that B is not certain what city Kim is in, and that may even be something that B hopes to convey (especially when B’s response has a particular intonation), but it is much less obvious that the literal meaning of B’s utterance implies that, as it does not contain words like I, know, certain, believe, etc.

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