[shameless promotion alert] I’ve been lucky enough to have had papers accepted to the last two SALT conferences, both of which are concerned with the semantics of certain features of wh-words and wh-questions.
My SALT 25 paper is about plural wh-words in Taketomi Yaeyaman. This is my only paper on this particular variety of Ryukyuan; at some point I’d like to come back to this topic, and get data from other varieties as well. The issue addressed in this paper is what the semantic contribution of plural-marked wh-words is, and how this can be spelled out in a Hamblin question semantics. There seem to be some interesting contrasts between Taketomi Yaeyaman and Korean, another issue I’d like to return to at some point.
My SALT 26 paper, co-authored with Elin McCready, is about how expressive content is interpreted in wh-questions, a topic that as far as we know has not yet been addressed in the literature. The primary data in this paper comes from Japanese, with a little bit of Cantonese thrown in to spice things up.
Not sure how or why or when I ended up so focused on the semantics of questions, but there it is.