Between 2017 and 2019, I was the PI of the project LLANG (Logically speaking: Language as an inferential system), funded by the Région Pays de la Loire (Etoiles Montantes 2017). The project studies the logical/functional vocabulary underlying speakers’ semantic competence, focusing on various natural language phenomena. A substantial part of the project investigates wh-expressions and the various paradigms and constructions where they occur cross-linguistically. Below, details on two workshops on this topic, which I co-organized together with Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego) .  

Description:
Wh-words appear in various constructions within and across languages (e.g., interrogatives, headed and free relative clauses, correlatives, clefts), raising the question of how their denotation varies and relates across these constructions. This project addresses this question by focusing on the semantics of multiple wh- constructions, containing two and more wh-phrases (e.g., interrogative clauses, correlatives, modal existential constructions, free relative clauses), or closely related wh-constructions (e.g. interrogative/relative clauses involving quantifiers, constructions triggering pair-list readings and/or functional readings).

Participants:
Adrian Brașoveanu (University of California Santa Cruz)
Ivano Caponigro (University of California San Diego)
Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University)
Veneeta Dayal (Yale University)
Patrick D. Elliott (MIT)
Anamaria Fălăuș (Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes – CNRS/Nantes University)
Andreea C. Nicolae (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)
Radek Šimík (Charles University, Prague)
Yimei Xiang (Rutgers University)

Complex multiple wh-constructions

Workshop on the semantics of complex multiple wh-, involving (i) 2 and more wh-phrases or (ii) 2 wh-phrases plus a quantifier.

Multiple wh-constructions and their kin

Workshop on the semantics of various multiple wh– constructions.