Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical

Abstract

In this article we re-assess the recent analysis of interrogative Slifting (e.g., Who is a Martian, do you think?) proposed in Haddican et al. (2014). In this analysis, the two component clauses have an indirect syntactic relation to each other, and the semantic and pragmatic relationship between the “slift” question and the main clause is conceived around the notion of evidentiality. We advance an alternative proposal whereby interrogative Slifting can be construed more on a par with wh-scope marking questions attested in languages like German or Hindi. Placing interrogative Slifting alongside wh-scope marking, a more familiar and better-studied construction type, avoids certain empirical difficulties of the original analysis and paves a way toward a uniform treatment of its syntactic, semantic and interface properties.

Keywords

Slifting, wh-scope marking, adjunction, interrogative, parenthetical

How to Cite

Stepanov, A. & Stateva, P., (2016) “Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1): 30. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.117

Download

Download PDF

2007

Views

1181

Downloads

1

Citations

Share

Authors

Arthur Stepanov (University of Nova Gorica)
Penka Stateva orcid logo (University of Nova Gorica)

Download

Issue

Publication details

Dates

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Identifiers

Peer Review

This article has been peer reviewed.

File Checksums (MD5)

  • PDF: 63bb037ac6e78176f128adfb8379f372