@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://aclanthology.org/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⊕Max{''}. I analyze various question-related phenomena to see how far this proposal can go.",
}
Markdown (Informal)
[Short answers as tests: A post-suppositional view on wh-questions and answers](https://aclanthology.org/2023.inqbnb-1.1) (Zhang, InqBnB-WS 2023)
ACL