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Where Question, Conditionals and Topics Converge

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Logic, Language and Meaning

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7218))

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Abstract

One puzzling fact about German is that yes-no questions that surface as verb-first structures can be interpreted as conditionals in a topic position. We provide an analysis using the basic idea of inquisitive semantics that questions and assertions can be treated on a par as denoting sets of possibilities. The key assumption is that in topic position, questions can be interpreted as conditionals if and only if they contain exactly one highlighted alternative possibility. The analysis correctly predicts the distribution of wh-questions and the distribution of so called irrelevance-conditionals containing auch (‘too’) as well.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Courant Research Centre “Text Structures”, University of Göttingen, Nikolausberger Weg 23, 37073, Göttingen, Germany

    Edgar Onea & Markus Steinbach

Authors
  1. Edgar Onea
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  2. Markus Steinbach
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maria Aloni , Floris Roelofsen , Galit W. Sassoon , Katrin Schulz  & Matthijs Westera , , ,  & 

  2. ACLC, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Vadim Kimmelman

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Onea, E., Steinbach, M. (2012). Where Question, Conditionals and Topics Converge. In: Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G.W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31481-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31482-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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