Questions and NPI-licensing

Yael Sharvit, UCLA

Presenting joint work with Elena Guerzoni, I defend the view that all questions contain (sometimes covert) disjunction and negation. I show how the theory solves some long-standing puzzles regarding NPI-licensing in questions, and for the behavior of ‘only’ in questions. Some puzzles concerning cross-linguistic variation are also discussed, without a definitive solution.