@inproceedings{zhang-2023-short,
    title = "Short answers as tests: A post-suppositional view on wh-questions and answers",
    author = "Zhang, Linmin",
    editor = "Richard, Valentin D.  and
      Roelofsen, Floris",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary",
    month = jun,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Nancy, France",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2023.inqbnb-1.1/",
    pages = "1--10",
    abstract = "This paper explores a post-suppositional view on wh-questions and their answers with dynamic semantics. Inspired by Brasoveanu (2013); Charlow (2017); Bumford (2017), I propose a unified treatment of items like modified numerals, focus items, and wh-items: they (i) introduce a discourse referent (dref) in a non-deterministic way and (ii) impose definiteness tests (and additional tests) in a delayed, post-suppositional manner at the sentential / discourse level. Thus, with a question like ``who smiled'', the (maximally informative) dref ``the one(s) who smiled'' is derived. A short answer like ``Mary and Max'' is considered another post-supposition-like, delayed test, checking whether the dref ``the one(s) who smiled'' is identical to (or includes) the sum ``Mary{\ensuremath{\oplus}}Max''. I analyze various question-related phenomena to see how far this proposal can go."
}