Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

A core use of human language is to describe facts about the world, using simple sentences such as “Abby is in the library.” However, we can also use complex expressions to convey sets of possible alternatives, as in “Abby is in the library or at the store.” Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine’s project investigates the grammatical strategies employed by different human languages for describing and asking about different alternatives. In other words, he studies cross-linguistic variation in the use of question words, disjunctions, and related grammatical particles and the interpretational mechanisms that underly these uses and their variation. Concretely, two subprojects are planned. First, Erlewine will investigate languages that have multiple disjunctors with contrasting range of use, such as Finnish “vai” versus “tai”. His preliminary work shows that such pairs of disjunctors in various languages of the world do not encode the same distinction. Second, he will investigate the use of question words (‘who’, ‘what’, etc.) to express non-interrogative, quantificational meanings, especially in combination with other grammatical particles. He aims to develop a compositional semantic theory that helps to explain the prevalence of such patterns and their cross-linguistic regularities.