It is a cross-linguistically pervasive generalization that indefinites (e.g., "somebody" in English) use interrogative words as building blocks (e.g., Japanese and Russian), though there are languages that use other building blocks, such as simpler indefi nites, in addition to/instead of interrogative words. The goal of this research project is to understand the contribution that interrogatives and simple indefinites make to the syntactic (i.e., structural) and semantic (i.e., meaning) behavior of complex indefinites, and to understand why languages choose one or the other strategy (or, sometimes, as in Spanish and German, both).
In order to achieve this goal, the project includes, in a first phase, the detailed, thorough study of the syntactic and seman tic properties of some of the indefinites in the languages above. The project then focuses on the compositional analysis of the indefinites using the tools of formal semantics. Finally, issues of cross-linguistic variation take the stage.
The project pu rsues the hypothesis that cross-linguistic variation in the expression of complex meaning can be due to different semantic choices that languages make (in addition to the possibility of some variation in meaning being syntactic in origin), as opposed to t he hypothesis that the only source of variation in meaning is syntactic/structural.