Veneeta Dayal will present “What Polar kayaa tells us about Speech Acts” in the department colloquium this Friday, April 25, at 3:30 in Machmer E-37. An abstract of her talk follows.
I first present the findings of Bhatt and Dayal (2014) about a wh expression kyaa that optionally occurs with polar and alternative questions, but not wh questions:
1a. (kyaa) tum cai piyoge
What you tea will-drink
“Will you drink tea?”
b. (kyaa) tum cai piyoge yaa cofii
What you tea will-drink or coffee
“Will you drink TEA or COFFEE?”
c. *kyaa kaun cai piyegaa
What who tea will-drink
“Who will drink tea?’
Polar kyaa is analyzed as a Speech Act operator QUEST in ForceP, rather than a Y/N question operator. While this is fairly unremarkable for matrix questions, embedded contexts present a more nuanced picture. The empirical generalization is that polar kyaa can occur in those embedded contexts in which the embedded question is discourse-active, in the sense of Dayal and Grimshaw (2009). The second part of the talk draws out the theoretical implications of this generalization, focusing on current approaches to polar questions and embedded speech acts, such as Farkas and Roelofsen (2012), Krifka (2009, 2014), among others.
