Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgments
This article is based upon a part of my Ph.D. dissertation (Frana 2010), although the details of the analysis are not exactly the same. I would like to thank my committee members, Angelika Kratzer, Irene Heim, Rajesh Bhatt, and Philip Bricker, for their invaluable help. Thanks also to Magdalena Kaufmann, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Kyle Rawlins, and two anonymous NALS reviewers for their comments and suggestions, which improved the final version of the paper. A talk based on this material was presented at NELS 41. I am grateful to the participants of this event, especially to Maria Aloni and Maribel Romero. All mistakes are my own.
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Frana, I. Quantified concealed questions. Nat Lang Semantics 21, 179–218 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-012-9089-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-012-9089-y