IMMAGES - Hosting a clause: IMplications for the MAtrix and its GuestS

The project aims to shed more light on the syntax and semantics of scalarity, a notion that figures prominently in theories on a wide range of linguistic phenomena including, perhaps most obviously, degree expressions and scalar focus particles like 'even' and 'only', but also desire predicates and primarily temporal expressions such as 'already'. We will focus on a rather large, though clearly delineated set of subphenomena and the way different modules interact in bringing them about, most importantly syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The work we are going to conduct is broadly defined by, but not limited to, the contributions of scalar focus particles across languages, with special attention to Mandarin Chinese, English and German.
 
Three work packages (WPs) address the following aspects, respectively:

(WP1) A unified view of minimal sufficiency
Exclusive scalar particles like 'just', 'only' and 'alone' sometimes have non-exclusive minimal sufficiency (MS) readings as in Just the thought of it sends shivers down my spine, adapted from Coppock & Beaver (2014). A major goal of WP1 is to unify such MS-readings for exclusive particles in if-clauses on the one hand and in monoclausal environments on the other (see Berends & Kaufmann 2009, Grosz 2012, Wimmer 2022 on the former; Coppock & Beaver 2014, Panizza & Sudo 2020 on the latter; and Coppock & Lindahl 2014 on both).
 
(WP2) Scalar particles in Chinese conditional evaluative constructions
The scalar particles cai 'not ... until' and jiu 'already' standardly occur in the consequent clauses of Chinese conditionals, giving rise to the following structure:
 
[if p, {cai, jiu} q]
 
Cai and jiu also appear in the Chinese variants of conditional evaluative constructions (CECs; cf. Kaufmann 2017, Yang 2020 on Japanese, Chung 2019 on Korean). In a nutshell, Chinese CECs can be schematized as follows:
 
[if p, {cai, jiu} good]
 
What they express is a prioritizing modal statement according to which the antecedent p is held desirable, conforms with certain rules, or serves as a good means to a given end. A major goal of WP2 is to pin down cai’s and jiu’s contributions to these modal statements.
 
(WP3) Chinese scalar particles as a window into a crosslinguistic syntax of scalarity
A central goal in Hole (2004) is to offer a systematic description of the aforementioned focus particles cai 'not ... until' and jiu 'already', along with dou 'all' and ye 'also'. WP3 aims to refine this system, incorporating insights from more recent work on these particles, and putting stronger emphasis on the scalar inferences they give rise to. It also aims to connect the insights gained this way with a syntax of scalarity developed for Chinese, Vietnamese and German by Hole (2015, 2017, 2023); see Quek & Hirsch (2017), Sun (2020, 2021) for related proposals.
 
The crosslinguistic perspective we take allows us to cover a large breadth of -- often novel -- data simultaneously and develop analyses that are both parsimonious and crosslinguistically valid.

References
Berends, M. & S. Kaufmann (2009). ‘Only’ and monotonicity in conditionals. In: A. Riester & T. Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) 13: 63-76.
Coppock, E. & D. Beaver (2014). Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31: 371-432.
Coppock, E. & A. Lindahl (2014). Minimal sufficiency readings in conditionals. In: C. Brown, Q. Gu, C. Loos, J. Mielens, & G. Neveu (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th Texas Linguistic Society: 24-38.
Grosz, P. (2012). On the grammar of optative constructions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Hole, D. (2004). Focus and background marking in Mandarin Chinese: system and theory behind cái, jiù, dōu and yě. London: Routledge.
Hole, D. (2015). A distributed syntax for evaluative ‘only’ sentences. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 34: 43-77.
Hole, D. (2017). A crosslinguistic syntax of scalar and non-scalar focus particle sentences: the view from Vietnamese and Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 26 (4): 389-409.
Hole, D. (2023). The relationship between Chinese zhiyou ‘only’ and cai: a matter of morphosyntax. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 32: 1-16.
Kaufmann, M. (2017). What ‘may’ and ‘must’ may be in Japanese. In: K. Funakoshi, S. Kawahara, & C. D. Tancredi (eds.), Japanese/Korean Linguistics 24. CSLI.
Panizza, D. & Y. Sudo (2020). Minimal sufficiency with covert even. Glossa 5 (1), 98: 1-25.
Quek, Y. & A. Hirsch (2017). Severing focus form and meaning in Standard and Colloquial Singapore English. In: A. Lamont & K. Tetzloff (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 47: 15-24.
Sun, Y. (2020). Only-concord in Vietnamese: support for a bipartite analysis and Undermerge. In: M. Asatryan, Y. Song & A. Whitmal (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 50: 183-192.
Sun, Y. (2021). A bipartite analysis of zhiyou ‘only’ in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 30: 319-355.
Yang, M. (2020). Distributivity and collectivity in the world domain: evidence from Japanese modality. Talk at the 161th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, November 21-22, 2020.