MGK Colloquium: A talk by Shumian Ye

Next MGK guest Shumian Ye will be visiting NegLab between June 15-June 19, 2026. Prof. Ye will give a talk as a part of talk as a part of the MGK Colloquium, entitled “Perspective anchoring and speaker-oriented adverbs in Mandarin Chinese”. For Zoom link please contact MGK Coordinator Dr. Derya Nuhbalaoglu-Ayan via E-mail: Nuhbalaoglu@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Date & Time: June 17, 10:15 – 11:45

As usual, the talk will take place in hybrid modality:

in Room IG 5.201 and on Zoom

Abstract: Abstract: Speaker-oriented adverbs have been noted to exhibit positive polarity across languages (e.g., Nilsen 2004; Ernst 2008, 2009; Liu 2009). Taking Mandarin Chinese as a case study, this talk shows that these adverbs are also sensitive to the type of polar question in which they occur, a contrast not captured by existing syntactic or semantic accounts of speaker-oriented adverbs. I propose a perspective-based analysis that derives the observed contrasts from independently motivated properties of polar question types and the semantics of speaker-oriented adverbs. Specifically, (i) speaker-oriented adverbs encode a fixed speaker perspective and are licensed only when the proposition they modify is anchored to the speaker’s perspective. (ii) Some polar questions anchor the proposition to the addressee’s perspective and therefore exclude these adverbs, whereas others anchor it to the speaker’s perspective and therefore license them. (iii) Negating perspectival expressions obligatorily triggers a perspective shift. Since declaratives are speaker-anchored by default, negation in declaratives allows only non-speaker-perspective interpretations within its scope, thereby excluding speaker-oriented adverbs. (iv) High negation in questions presupposes that its prejacent is in the projected common ground, whose perspective is inherently speaker-anchored, and therefore licenses speaker-oriented adverbs within its scope.