The Syntax and Semantics of Modified Concealed Questions

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2011

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy % John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression a may be type-shifted into an expression ?z:PðaÞ, where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2005

Santa Cruz Summer Linguistics Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1973

I SUMMARY I have suggested that the "embedded-question/free relative" ambiguity present in: (1) What lay on the table surprised John. occurs also in such sentences as (19): (19) John knows the man that murdered Smith. (19) can be construed either as asserting that John knows a specific person, or that John knows that person's identity--just as (1) can be construed either as asserting that a certain something surprised John, or that the identity of that something surprised him. If the analysis which I have sketched turns out to be correct, a syntactic account like that of CL Baker (cf. "Notes on the Description of English Questions," Foundations of Language, Vol. 6, No. 2 (May, 1970), pp. 197-219.) of the ambiguity present in (1) should be subjected to closer scrutiny. For, on the basis of the single deep structure I have proposed in (4) (see typescript--WG), in which the phrase "what lay on the table" is a relative clause, the ambiguity present in (1) can be accounted for in purely semantic terms. II PAST PRESENTS --The late Professor Paul Schachter wrote the comments on my typescript. (Professor Schachter chaired my Examination Committee and directed my UCLA Dissertation.) --It was not until 2013, ten years after my retirement, that I first became aware of Professor Irene Heim's "Concealed Questions" (in Semantics from Different Points of View, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg NewYork,1979.) Imagine my delight upon learning, thirty-four years after the fact, that the impetus and inspiration for Professor Heim's maiden publication had been my obscure typescript of 1973. Beginning in 1979 that typescript had racked up thirteen Google cites--mirabile dictu, from people who had never laid an eye on it! And two Ph.D. dissertations had been written about "concealed questions"--which Heim had made famous by decking them out in East Coast Montagovian. Will persnickety processions of hatchecks, curlicues, crotchets and funny fonts never cease to enthrall?

Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 2015

This paper presents a novel theory of concealed questions (CQs). The theory is the first to provide a unified and principled account of definite, indefinite, and quantified CQs and CCQs (CQ-containing CQs). It also explains observation and some related facts.

This paper argues that the range of interpretations of concealed ques- tion (CQs) is much wider than has previously been assumed. It pro- poses a principled pragmatic account of this range of interpretations. The account deals with denite, indenite, and quantied CQs in a uniform way. It also explains Greenberg's (1977) observation and some related facts.

This paper aims to clarify under which conditions questions can be embedded. It concerns the syntactic and semantic selection (so-called c-and s-selection) of verbs of propositional attitude, i.e. verbs denoting mental process towards a class of abstract objects that are propositions. A question is related to an interrogative speech act. It is therefore embeddable under an interrogative performative verb as shown with ask in (2), the embedding of (1). Questions are also embedded under interrogative non performative verbs as in with wonder. More surprisingly, they also appear with non-interrogative verbs such as know in (4)a (though not in all contexts, see (4)b).

Natural Language Semantics, 2013

This paper presents a novel treatment of quantified concealed questions (CQs), examining different types of NP predicates and deriving the truth conditions for pair-list and set readings. A generalization is proposed regarding the distribution of the two readings, namely that pair-list readings arise from CQs with relational head nouns, whereas set readings arise from CQs whose head nouns are not (or no longer) relational. It is shown that set readings cannot be derived under the 'individual concept' approach, one of the most influential analyses of CQs on the market. The paper offers a solution to this problem. It shows that once we adopt an independently motivated view of traces-according to which traces are copies with descriptive content (Fox, Linguist Inq 30:157-196, 1999; Fox, Linguist Inq 33:63-96, 2002)-nothing else needs to be postulated to derive set readings within an individual-concept-based analysis. Thus, what seemed to be a challenge for this type of analysis turns out to be an argument in its favor.

Our paper addresses the following question: is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements (responsive predicates in Lahiri's 2002 typology), of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a reponsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of 'P+Q' is, informally, "to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q". We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of weakly exhaustive readings of embedded questions (in particular after surprise).

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2013

This paper analyses the alternation between improper indirect questions and DPs containing a restrictive relative in European Portuguese. We propose that this alternation is lexically restricted, only occurring with weakly assertive cognitive definite predicates, in the sense of Hinzen and Sheehan (2011), such as saber, 'to know' or descobrir, 'to discover'. We also claim that the alternation between an improper indirect wh-CP and a DP containing a restrictive relative is possible because they share significant features, namely they both involve sentences with declarative illocutionary force and wh/operator chains, and exhibit a high level of referentiality, due to the D-linked nature of the whP in the improper indirect question and the definite and specific nature of the DP that includes the relative.

2000