Q-particles and islands in Sinhala wh- and polar questions

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the Q-particle də in Sinhala wh-questions and polar questions. Previous approaches propose a two-legged semantic dependency: (i) the lower leg projects a set of alternatives and (ii) the upper leg forms a choice function dependency. The contribution of the present paper is two-fold. First, it presents novel empirical data on complex questions with islands that pose a serious problem for this architecture when applied to polar questions. Second, it develops a new proposal that maintains a common meaning for the Q-particle in the two question types while avoiding this empirical problem. The key insight of the new analysis is to liberalize the upper dependency leg as to pass up a focus value that can later combine with different operators: with the Q-operator in wh-questions and with the squiggle operator in polar questions.