Quantificational Variability and Plurality of Questions in Korean

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper is a rudimentary attempt to better understand the quantificational variability effects (QVE) in Korean embedded questions. It is pointed out that Hong’s (2015) generalization leaves a few important phenomena uncovered and thus fails to provide an appropriate descriptive generalization of the relevant constructions. This paper presents a new set of data, e.g., yes/no questions based on plural subject NPs and individual-level predicates, which do allow QVE in Korean, contra Hong (2015). It is argued that Beck & Sharvit’s (2002) plurality-based account can explain the Korean data with a slight modification to their original proposal, namely by allowing subquestions to be generated in a more liberal way, e.g., based on such implicit arguments as event or situation variables in Davidson’s (1967) sense.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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