Our Q&A session will be on Sep 6 (Sunday) at 2:30 London time. Here's our zoom link: https://umd.zoom.us/j/98364309847. We look forward seeing you there!
Our emails are: markliu@scarletmail.rutgers.edu and yuanyang@umd.edu
Here's a short abstract:
We discuss new data concerning Mandarin wh-indefinites that challenge the
widely accepted view that they are Negative Polarity Items (Li 1992; Cheng
1995; Lin 1998; Xie 2007). Instead, we present naturally-occurring examples
showing that they can in principle appear in positive episodic environments
(that are veridical). Moreover, in these contexts they express “indifference”
or “ignorance”, similar to modal indefinites like Spanish algún and
German irgendein
(Alonso-Ovalle and Méndez-Benito 2010, Aloni and Port 2010). We show
wh-indefinites
can be analyzed in the alternatives-&-exhaustificaiton framework (contra
Giannakidou 2018), where they trigger individual alternatives (contra
Chierchia and Liao 2014), and various modal inferences arise through
interaction between exhaustification and modals.