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Theoretical Framework and the Baseline Analysis of Interrogative Complements

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Question-orientedness and the Semantics of Clausal Complementation

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 106))

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Abstract

The previous chapter has introduced the primary goal of this book, i.e., comparing the proposition-oriented and question-oriented semantics for clausal complementation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I set aside the contribution of tense in this book.

  2. 2.

    I disregard the Ï•-features (i.e., the gender and number features) of pronouns here.

  3. 3.

    In Sect. 2.4, I will refine the treatment and include the proposition ‘Ann and Bill sang’ to this set.

  4. 4.

    Another difference between Hamblin (1973) and Karttunen (1977) is that Hamblin (1973) includes false answers in the set while Karttunen (1977) only includes true answers. Furthermore, the treatment of the answer corresponding to No one sang for Who sang? differs. What I will call the proposition-set representation does not share these properties with Karttunen’s denotation. That is, the proposition-set includes false answers.

  5. 5.

    A proposition-set Q is downward-closed iff for any propositions p and p′, if p ∈ Q and p′⊂ p, then p′∈ Q. See Ciardelli and Roelofsen (2017) for empirical motivations for assuming downward-closure in the proposition-set representation of question meanings.

  6. 6.

    I will consider the situation in which no one sang in Sect. 2.4.

  7. 7.

    I use the ‘⇒’ symbol to indicate that entailment holds at the empirical level.

  8. 8.

    Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) further motivates their semantics based on the possibility of the ‘de dicto’ reading of know-wh sentences. In Sect. 2.6 below, I will adopt a different analysis of ‘de re’/‘de dicto’ ambiguity, inspired by Beck and Rullmann (1999).

  9. 9.

    The exact method by which Heim (1994) derives a SE answer from a proposition-set denotation differs from the function from proposition-sets to partitions in (30). Heim assumes the proposition-set denotation as in (i), and utilizes the function in (ii) to derive the SE reading.

    1. (i)

      ⟦which student sang⟧ = \(\lambda w.\{p|\exists x[p = \lambda w'.\mathsf {sang}_{w'}(x) \wedge \mathsf {sang}_w(x) \wedge \mathsf {student}_{w}(x)]\}\)

    2. (ii)

      \(\mbox{\textsf {Ans2}}(w) = \lambda Q_{{\langle {s,{\langle {st,t}\rangle }}\rangle }}\lambda w'. \bigcap Q(w) = \bigcap Q(w')\)

    This analysis is designed to derive a ‘de dicto’ reading of which-questions, predicting that SE answers and ‘de dicto’ readings necessarily co-occur (as also predicted by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984)). Since this prediction is not completely uncontroversial (Beck & Rullmann, 1999), I will assume the function in (30) which is independent of the ‘de re’/‘de dicto’ distinction, rather than Heim’s (ii).

  10. 10.

    A predicate P is divisive iff ∀x[P(x) →∀y ≤ x[y ∈ Dom(P) → P(y)]].

  11. 11.

    This is so since a morphologically singular NP denotes a set of atomic individuals (Link, 1983; Sharvy, 1980), and that a which-phrase ‘ranges over’ the denotation of the NP. This results in the set of propositions corresponding to these atomic individuals as the denotation of the whole clause. This is true both under the Karttunen-style and under the Hamblin-style compositional semantics for wh-clauses. See Sect. 2.6 for details of the subclausal composition of wh-complements I assume in this book.

  12. 12.

    Here, I represent the question denotation as having the ‘de dicto’ reading, with the world index of the NP-part of the which-phrase bound by the lambda introducing the world-dependence. See Sect. 2.6 for more on the subclausal composition of wh-complements, including the treatment of ‘de re’ and ‘de dicto’ readings of which-questions following Beck and Rullmann (1999).

  13. 13.

    See Elliott et al. (2018), Alonso-Ovalle and Rouillard (2019), Xiang (2019), Maldonado (2020) for recent discussion on the role of the morphosyntactic number of wh-phrases in the semantics of wh-questions and its relation to the so-called ‘higher-order’ readings.

  14. 14.

    However, see van Rooij (2004) for a pragmatic account of embedded mention-some questions with a theory where semantic evaluation is sensitive to the relative utility of information states.

  15. 15.

    Compositionally, Fox (2013) derives the representations in (66a) by having a distributive operator over locations scope below the possibility modal, yielding a set of propositions that is not closed under conjunction. In contrast, (65b), which doesn’t contain a possibility modal or an existential quantifier scoping over the distributivity over locations, yields a proposition set that is closed under conjunction. A consequence for this is that (65a) can receive a non-MS reading if the distributivity operator scopes above the possibility modal.

  16. 16.

    Rough proof: for any exhaustivity-neutral Q, any p ∈ Q, and any w, p = Exh Q(p). This guarantees the equivalence in the first line of (80). For any exhaustivity-neutral Q and any w, A n s F w(Q) = {A n s D w(Q)}. This guarantees the equivalence in the second line.

  17. 17.

    More precisely, following Theiler et al. (2018), interrogative-veridicality can be defined as follows:

    1. (i)

      A predicate V  is interrogative veridical if and only if for every exhaustivity-neutral interrogative complement Q and any answer p to Q: \({\ulcorner }\)x Vs Q\({\urcorner }\) & p  ⇒ \({\ulcorner }\)x Vs p\({\urcorner }\)

    It is necessary to restrict the types of interrogative complements to exhaustivity-neutral ones in the definition above because, otherwise, even prototypically veridical predicates like know would be classified as non-veridical. This can be illustrated with the following example, in which the complement is not exhaustivity-neutral and has a salient MS reading.

    1. (i)

      Alice knows where one can buy an Italian newspaper.

    Suppose Italian newspapers are sold at both Paperworld and Newstopia, but Alice only knows that they are sold at Newstopia and ignorant about Paperworld. Then, the following sentence is intuitively false:

    1. (ii)

      Alice knows that one can buy an Italian newspaper at Paperworld.

    This shows that the inference of the form \({\ulcorner }\)x Vs Q\({\urcorner }\) & p ⇒ \({\ulcorner }\)x Vs p\({\urcorner }\) can be invalid with know if we didn’t restrict Q to exhaustivity-neutral complements. Because of this restriction, I use singular-which complements in examples in this subsection.

  18. 18.

    See Uegaki (2015, 158–9) for a possible analysis of why the veridical reading is preferred over the non-veridical reading in interrogative-embedding, based on the pragmatic principle of Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (Dalrymple et al., 1998). See also Theiler et al. (2018, fn.41) for an issue with treating communication predicates as lexically ambiguous between veridical and non-veridical readings.

  19. 19.

    Spector and Egré’s (2015) analysis does not capture the implication from interrogative-veridicality to declarative-veridicality. See Theiler et al. (2018) for a hypothetical predicate that is non-declarative-veridical and interrogative-veridical and yet predicted to be possible by Spector and Egré (2015).

  20. 20.

    See Uegaki (2021) for a local-triggering analysis of the UP/EP set within the Spector and Egré style analysis.

  21. 21.

    A majority of this section is taken from Uegaki (2021).

  22. 22.

    In order for which to take scope over the materials in the TP, it has to be assumed that a wh-phrase internally merges to a projection below CP before internally merging to the specifier of CP.

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    Wataru Uegaki

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  1. Wataru Uegaki
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Uegaki, W. (2022). Theoretical Framework and the Baseline Analysis of Interrogative Complements. In: Question-orientedness and the Semantics of Clausal Complementation. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 106. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15940-4_2

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