John Benjamins Publishing Company
Unfortunate questions
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Abstract
This paper examines the semantic properties of evaluative adverbs, such as unfortunately, in question environments in French. We take Bonami and Godard’s (2008) analysis for malheureusement (‘unfortunately’) in declarative sentences, where such propositional adverbs are analyzed as ancillary commitments, and extend it to a broader array of data, including polar and wh-questions. In a nutshell, we argue that malheureusement can take as input a set of propositions, which triggers an indifference interpretation of the sort that characterizes unconditional sentences. We also show that evaluatives may take a proposition as argument when they occur in polar questions, the only restriction occurring in negative polar questions, where biases are decisive in making the sentence acceptable.
Abstract
This paper examines the semantic properties of evaluative adverbs, such as unfortunately, in question environments in French. We take Bonami and Godard’s (2008) analysis for malheureusement (‘unfortunately’) in declarative sentences, where such propositional adverbs are analyzed as ancillary commitments, and extend it to a broader array of data, including polar and wh-questions. In a nutshell, we argue that malheureusement can take as input a set of propositions, which triggers an indifference interpretation of the sort that characterizes unconditional sentences. We also show that evaluatives may take a proposition as argument when they occur in polar questions, the only restriction occurring in negative polar questions, where biases are decisive in making the sentence acceptable.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Expressing contrast in Romanian 1
- When the benefit is on the fringe 19
- Degree fronting in Québec French and the syntactic structure of degree quantifier DPs 39
- On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality 55
- Topic prominence is not a factor of variation between Brazilian and European Portuguese 71
- When Dialectology studies contribute to lexical semantics and to Etymology 89
- Cartography and agrammatic syntactic production in Ibero-Romance 115
- The valuation of gender agreement in DP 133
- (Definite) denotation and case in Romance 149
- Compounding in Romance and English 167
- Epistemic modals in the past 185
- Floating parenthetical coordinate clauses 203
- Unfortunate questions 223
- Typology or reconstruction 239
- Sentential coordination and ellipsis 255
- Underapplication of vowel reduction to schwa in Majorcan Catalan productive derivation and verbal inflection 273
- Focus and the development of N-words in Spanish 291
- On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish 305
- Stylistic Fronting and Remnant movement in Old French 323
- Person restrictions and the representation of third person – an argument from Barceloní Catalan 343
- Definite DPs without lexical nouns in French 363
- Index 391
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
- Expressing contrast in Romanian 1
- When the benefit is on the fringe 19
- Degree fronting in Québec French and the syntactic structure of degree quantifier DPs 39
- On sentence-internal le même (‘the same’) in French and pluractionality 55
- Topic prominence is not a factor of variation between Brazilian and European Portuguese 71
- When Dialectology studies contribute to lexical semantics and to Etymology 89
- Cartography and agrammatic syntactic production in Ibero-Romance 115
- The valuation of gender agreement in DP 133
- (Definite) denotation and case in Romance 149
- Compounding in Romance and English 167
- Epistemic modals in the past 185
- Floating parenthetical coordinate clauses 203
- Unfortunate questions 223
- Typology or reconstruction 239
- Sentential coordination and ellipsis 255
- Underapplication of vowel reduction to schwa in Majorcan Catalan productive derivation and verbal inflection 273
- Focus and the development of N-words in Spanish 291
- On verbal duplication in River Plate Spanish 305
- Stylistic Fronting and Remnant movement in Old French 323
- Person restrictions and the representation of third person – an argument from Barceloní Catalan 343
- Definite DPs without lexical nouns in French 363
- Index 391
