The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, April 23, 1-2pm. Our own Teru Mizuno will be presenting his work:

Q-particles in embedded declaratives, mood, and clausal complementation

Abstract: ‘Q-particles’ are cross-linguistically attested functional items that play a role in forming questions, disjunctions and indefinites (Hagstrom 1998; Cable 2010; Uegaki 2018; a.o.). This study investigates the hitherto understudied phenomena in which the Japanese Q-particle ka appears in embedded declarative. It will be shown that those Q-particles, which I call `Modally Functioning Q-particles (MFQs)’, can appear only under a certain class of attitude predicates. I will argue that MFQs are syntactically  Mood heads, functioning as the exponents of the `unsettledness presupposition’. I propose a formal semantic account that captures their behavior and distribution, and consider the implications they bring to the theory of Q-particles, mood and clausal embedding.

Zoom information will be distributed by email and can be obtained from Stefan Kaufmann.

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