Project: Intervention effects in Japanese  

Certain quantifiers are known to disrupt the interpretation of wh-in-situ (Beck 2006 and many others). In this literature on intervention effects, the precise characterization of the set of interveners as well as the nature of intervention have been the subject of continued debate. Building on Shibata’s (2015a) work on disjunction and other work on the behavior of quantifiers in Japanese, we offer a new generalization concerning the nature of intervention in Japanese: A quantifier is a potential intervener if and only if it is scope-rigid. This generalization is explained by — and in turn supports — Kotek’s (2017) account of intervention effects as reflecting a deep incompatibility between Predicate Abstraction and the pointwise computation of Rooth-Hamblin alternatives.

Superseded by the full paper

Keywords: scope intervention effects Japanese Alternative Semantics reconstruction scope-rigidity