The Interrogative in a Syntactic Framework

Abstract

The interrogative sentences are so different from others, in form, in meaning, and in their textual neighbors, as to permit a variety of specialized descriptions designed to account for them. In this paper, interrogative sentences will be characterized not by a special description but as a particular case in a general theory that produces and analyzes all sentences of the language. That is to say, we will try to obtain the forms and contextual restrictions of the interrogatives from the syntax of the non-interrogative sentences and discourses, without any special syntactic rules made up only for the interrogatives.¹