Anna Szabolcsi (NYU): The grey eminences behind meet and join in some natural languages

In many languages, from Japanese to Russian to Hungarian, the same elements that form quantifier words (`everyone’ and `someone’) also occur as connectives, question particles, focus-associated particles, and so on. Do they have stable meanings? The good news is that meet and join seem to be at work in their varied environments, especially as understood in Inquisitive Semantics. A challenge is posed by the fact that, judged by their grammatical behavior, these elements are typically one-place operators, so they cannot be performing meet and join themselves.