On the interpretation of concealed questions

Determiner phrases have the ability to act as "concealed questions" (CQs), embedded questions in sentences like John knows the time (i.e., John knows what time it is). The fact that know and wonder differ in their ability to embed CQs partially motivated the hypothesis (Grimshaw 1979) that verbs select the possible syntactic categories of their complements independently of selection for the semantic type of their complements. Theories of CQ meaning generally follow Grimshaw in assuming them to denote questions, or else take them to denote individual concepts (intensions of individuals; Heim 1979, Romero 2005). This dissertation argue that the former assumption does not easily describe the semantically conditioned distribution of CQs, which can be embedded under only those verbs which allow propositional complements as well as question complements. The latter assumption, on the other hand, incorrectly predicts that any DP with an individual concept meaning can be used as a CQ.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Nathan, Lance Edward

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kai von Fintel.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37423

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37423