A plea for a functional dependency approach to correlatives

Abstract

This paper compares two possible analyses of multi-head correlatives in Hindi; the canonical semantics of these structures proposed by Dayal (1996) and a comparable analysis by Gajewski (2008). While the first relies on the semantics of multiple-wh questions, the second builds on the semantics of wh- free relatives to derive the semantics of the Hindi multi-head correlative. Although the free relative approach seems to derive comparable truth conditions, I argue that this is only achievable through significant stipulations about the nature of pluralization and presupposition projection mechanisms. The required universal quantification over pair-lists which is central to the semantics of the multiple-wh correlative is best captured by a functional dependency between the wh-elements. To that end, I propose an updated analysis of these structures based on the functional dependency approach of Dayal (1996) that aligns multiple headed correlatives with multiple wh-questions rather than free relatives.