[SynSem] Michael Yoshitaka ERLEWINE (National University of Singapore)

retour Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique

Michael Yoshitaka ERLEWINE (U. Helsinki & National University of Singapore)

Universal free choice from concessive conditionals in Tibetan and beyond

Tibetan forms universal free choice items from a combination of a wh-phrase with the copular verb yin, conditional ending na, and scalar ‘even’ particle yang. Similar morphosyntactic combinations derive universal FCIs in a range of Dravidian languages and Japanese, which are genetically unrelated to Tibetan.
Motivated by such data, I develop a new approach to the compositional semantics for universal free choice based on these ingredients. The proposal also suggests a new approach to subtrigging effects.