Research

 

Binominal each and the internal structure of distributivity (part of my dissertation)

In a nutshell… Binominal each, alongside distributive numerals, has been argued to exhibit an ‘association-with-distributivity’ effect (Champollion 2015, Kuhn 2015, 2017, see also Balusu 2005, Henderson 2014, Cable 2014). In this paper, I show that analyses along these lines fall short of two empirical generalizations established for binominal each, namely, Counting Quantifier Constraint (Safir and Stowell 1988, Sutton 1993, Szabolcsi 2010) and Extensive Measurement Constraint (Zhang 2013).  Counting quantifier constraint The boys read two books each. *The boys read {the/those} books each. *The boys read books each. Extensive measurement constraint The angles are 60 degrees each. *The coffees are 60 degrees each. Instead, I submit that binominal each does not associate with distributivity, but with the internal structure of distributivity, i.e., the internal, mereological structure of the functional dependency induced by distributivity. Concretely, it is argued to impose a monotonicity constraint that the measure function provided by its host should track the internal structure of this functional dependency. Since monotonic measurement typically tracks the part-whole structure of the object being measured (Schwarzschild 2006, Wellwood 2015), this amounts to saying that binominal each measures distributivity, with help of its host. To implement the monotonicity constraint in a compositional manner, a version of dynamic plural logic is offered that resembles the original Dynamic Plural Logic in van den Berg (1996) but also incorporates more recent innovations such as domain plurality and delayed evaluation, found in its cousin logic Plural Compositional DRT (Brasoveanu 2006, 2008, 2013).

Appears in: Article Binominal each and association with the internal structure of distributivity (under review) Presentation Law, Jess H.-K. 2019. Constraints on distributivity. Colloquium talk given at University of California, Santa Cruz, January 16, 2019. Law, Jess H.-K. 2018. Monotonicity in distributivity with binominal each. Poster presented at the 47th annual meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS47), Cornell University, October 2018.

Cantonese discourse particle ho2

In a nutshell… We investigate the sentence-final particle ho from Cantonese, which can stack on top of other sentence-final particles indicating various types of speech acts. We argue that ho is a higher level question operator that operates at the level of speech acts. More concretely, it takes a speech act (assertion or question) and returns a new interrogative speech act asking whether the input speech act can be felicitously performed by the addressee. We take the presence of this kind of higher level question operator in natural language as novel evidence that a mechanism for operating on speech acts is needed. Building on Farkas and Bruce (2009), Rawlins (2010), Bledin and Rawlins (2017), we develop a mechanism in the style of Update Semantics for operating on speech acts.

Appears in: Article Law, Jess H.-K., Haoze Li, Diti Bhadra. To appear. Questioning speech acts. Proceedings of the 22nd Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB22). Presentation Bhadra, Diti, Jess H.-K. Law, Haoze Li. Questioning speech acts. Talk presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 22, Potsdam, Germany.

Bare nouns and their discourse potentials

In a nutshell… Bare nouns have long been thought to have a different compositional semantics from regular indefinites, whether because they are kind terms (Carlson 1977, Chierchia 1998), incorporated (Farkas & de Swart 2003, Chung & Ladusaw 2004, Dayal 2011) or simply lack existential force (Dayal 2013). The discourse potential of bare nouns provides a nice window for probing the compositional semantics of bare nouns: if bare nouns and indefinites share the same semantics, they should exhibit the same discourse potential. If we can find different discourse potentials coming from bare nouns and indefinites, we then may have found another argument for taking bare nouns and indefinites to have different compositional semantics. This work probes the discourse potential of bare nouns in Mandarin with a judgment test and a processing test. The major finding is that although bare nouns support pronominal anaphora, they do so in a more effortful way than regular indefinites.

Appears in: Article Law, Jess H.-K. & Kristen Syrett. 2018. Experimental evidence for the discourse potential of bare nouns. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS47). Presentation Law, Jess H.-K & Kristen Syrett. 2016. Experimental evidence for the discourse potential of bare nouns. Poster to be presented at the 47th annual meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS47), October 2016.

Free choice, exhaustivity, and cumulativity

In a nutshell… Free choice items in numerous languages are incompatible with cumulative NPs, such as bare nouns and mass nouns. I show how this generalization follows nicely from the exhaustification approach, with the simple additional assumption that domains for exhaustification are closed under sum formation. This study provides a novel argument for the exhaustification approach to free choice indefinites (Chierchia 2004, 2006, 2013, Fox 2007, Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2010).

Appears in: Article The number sensitivity of modal indefinites, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. Presentations Law, Jess H.-K. 2016. The number sensitivity of modal indefinites, Poster presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 21, University of Edinburgh, September, 2016. Law, Jess H.-K. 2015. Free choice and plurality, presented at MACSIM V, University of Delaware, October, 2015. Law, Jess. 2015. Free choice, exhaustivity, and cumulativity, presented at RULing X, Rutgers, May 1-2.

Distributive items

In a nutshell… We argue that the distributivity marker ‘ge’ in Mandarin is an ‘anti-cumulativity operator’ that is parasitic on a distributive operator. What it does is to impose a condition on the predicate P output by a D-op that the sum of any subevent in the output of the D-op not to be in P. A recent trend on distributivity is to rethink the relation between the D-op and overt distributivity along the following lines: perhaps a lot of the distributive items just work in tandem with the real D-Op, but do not serve as D-Ops themselves. A recent study with this vision is Champollion (2015a), who, drawing on the distinct distribution of bi-nominal each, argues that this lexical item introduces dependent numerals parasitic on a covert D-Op. In this paper, we defend the same general view by placing under scrutiny ge, an adverb in Mandarin considered as the distributive item by many scholars (e.g., Lin 2004; Lee et al 2009).

Appears in:Article Li, Haoze and Jess H.-K Law. 2017. At least some distributive operators aren’t distributive operators, in Proceedings of NELS-46, GSLA. Presentation Li, Haoze and Jess H.-K. Law. 2015. At least some distributive operators aren’t distributive operators. Poster presented at the 46th annual meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 46), University of Concordia, October, 2015.

Focus intervention

In a nutshell… Focus intervention has long been seen as a minimality effect (Beck 2006). However, with the recent discovery that focus-sensitive operators trigger intervention only when they scope over both a focused phrase and a wh-phrase (Li 2013), we argue that focus intervention is related to the quantificational structure of focus-sensitive operators. In particular, the interaction of focus alternatives (triggered by focused-phrases) and ordinary alternatives (triggered by wh-phrases and a host of other expressions) gives rise to sets of sets of alternatives, which become illicit quantificational domains for focus-sensitive operators. Focus intervention is a manifestation of this type of illicit quantificational domains. This idea is explored in Focus intervention: a quantificational domain approach. To see that the same analysis also predicts focus intervention in contexts other than wh-questions, you can take a look at Generalized focus intervention. Better still, the manuscript entitled Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention is a synthesis of these two articles.

This work appears in:Articles Li, Haoze and Jess Law. 2016. Alternatives in different dimensions: a case study of focus intervention. Linguistics and Philosophy 39: 201 – 245. [preprint] Li, Haoze and Jess Law. 2014. Focus intervention: a quantificational domain approach. In Proceedings of NELS-44, eds. Leland Kusmer and Jyoti Iyer, GSLA. Li, Haoze and Jess Law. 2014. Generalized focus intervention. In Proceedings of SALT-24, eds. Todd Snider. Presentations Li, Haoze and Jess Law. 2014. Focus intervention effects and the quantificational domains of focus-sensitive operators. Presented at the 37th annual meeting of Generative Linguistics in Old World (GLOW 37). Center for Syntax, Semantics and Phonology, HUB, Brussels, Belgium. Li, Haoze and Jess Law. 2013. Focus intervention effects. Presented at the 44th annual meeting of North East Linguistic Society (NELS 44), University of Connecticut, Storr, October 18-20, 2013.