Spanish Bare Interrogatives and Number

Spanish quién admits singular and plural answers, quiénes only plural ones. With Maldonado's weak singular and strong plural the judgments follow, and ranging over conjunctions and disjunctions gives two groups a strongest answer and free choice disjunctions, as individuals do not. Elliott, Nicolae and Sauerland's strong singular and weak plural leave a collective lifting only the tautology as an answer and under must keep disjunctions competition cannot remove.

Implementation notes

• A world of a collective or mixed nucleus is the extension of the predicate before closure under sum, ElliottNicolaeSauerland2022.starred, and a world of a distributive one the plurality it holds of.
• Under must a world is replaced by its modal base. Question.isExhaustivelyResolvable_box_iff gives the equivalence at one world, and contentMust compares forms over every set of pluralities, the empty one included; since (14) compares domains of worlds, this takes each base to be realized.
• The paper's Hamblin sets have undefined members, # in (41), (54) and (77). Here they are total: the strong singular's set is over the atoms, as (50c) lists it. Since # is never true this does not affect Dayal's presupposition.
• G+ (47) is a fragment of Elliott et al.'s range chosen for illustration, so the forms range over upwardGQ, and hamblinPlus is the printed fragment. The reasoning of the paper's §5.3 needs the former, where quién(et)t is vacuous under must. On the fragment no member is strongest on the modal base of (68b), competition does exclude (68a), and EXHp drops where the form is undefined, as the paper's fallback paragraph says.
• §5.3 treats quién_e, quiénes_e and quién(et)t as competitors of quiénes(et)t, rivals, a wider set than ElliottNicolaeSauerland2022.Form.alts.
• The weak singular ranges over nonempty restrictors, (32), (35), so it presupposes existence, where Elliott et al.'s (57) and n. 19 have quién acceptable without it.
• (52) says no alternative is defined, where Elliott et al.'s (45) says none is defined with EXH. ElliottNicolaeSauerland2022.AvoidsIneffability is the latter, with every alternative counted as equivalent, which is harmless over a distributive nucleus (ElliottNicolaeSauerland2022.Form.strawsonEquiv). The alternatives in the one theorem using it are undefined outright, so it holds on either statement.

TODO

• Cumulative answers, (59)–(63) and (71)–(72), which have the shape of the mixed predicates with a two-place closure, and the es grande argument (56)–(58), are rows and prose only.
• The speaker variation with collective predicates, (76)–(81), needs Hamblin sets with undefined members and Fox's partition condition.

References

• Alonso-Ovalle & Rouillard 2023, Spanish Bare Interrogatives and Number
• Maldonado 2020, Plural Marking and d-Linking in Spanish Interrogatives
• Elliott et al. 2022, Who and What Do Who and What Range Over Cross-Linguistically? formalized
• Dayal 1996, Locality in WH Quantification: Questions and Relative Clauses in Hindi
• Spector 2008, An Unnoticed Reading for Wh-Questions: Elided Answers and Weak Islands