Number marking in interrogative phrases: 'What' interrogatives in Farsi

Abstract

Number inflection within interrogative phrases restricts the types of possible answers that these phrases allow for (Dayal, 2016). The paper focuses on Farsi what interrogatives. In Farsi, plural what interrogative phrases require answers naming plural individuals. In contrast, singular what interrogative phrases allow for answers naming singular or plural individuals. This is the case both for bare (what) and for complex interrogatives (what book), but only when these are not marked with differential object morphology: with the differential object marker -ro, only bare singular interrogatives allow for answers naming plural individuals. We derive this pattern from the following assumptions: (i) that interrogatives can range over generalized quantifiers (Spector, 2008; Xiang, 2016; Elliott et al., 2022), (ii) that singular marking is a default in the case of bare interrogatives, but not in the case of complex interrogatives, and (iii) that -ro restricts a set down to one of its singleton subsets. We note that extending this line of analysis to which interrogatives poses questions about their structure, which are left unanswered here.