Question Understanding from the Perspective of Context Theory

This paper uses context theory to study the question in natural language. In syntax, questions can be classified into polar questions, alternative questions, concealed questions, and inquisitive questions. In semantics, it can be divided into polar questions and inquisitive questions. Only inquisitive questions with characteristics of inquisitiveness, informativeness, compliance, and transparency need to be studied by context theory. There are three levels for question context: question-answer facts, background knowledge, and question presupposition. The question context composes the possible world where the question is. Question understanding is a function of the mapping of the question through the possible worlds, and the set of propositions consisting of different possible worlds of the question context and the set of propositions consisting of different possible answers to the question are mapped to each other, resulting in different answers in different possible worlds of the same question.

Sustantivos e interrogativas encubiertas en español

Since Baker (1968) suggested the term concealed question —which, following Autor (forthcoming), we translate as “interrogativa encubierta”— to refer to a DP that complements a verb and can be paraphrased by an indirect question (Preguntó el precio/Preguntó cuál era el precio), one of the most debated issues in the literature on languages other than Spanish has been, beside the concept of concealed question itself, what nouns can appear in this type of constructions. However, this issue has practically gone unnoticed in the descriptive grammar of Spanish. This article aims to deal with the ensuing shortcomings of Spanish grammar as well as to review the proposals that fall outside the context of Hispanic linguistics. Most importantly, on the assumption that concealed questions are predicate complements that are remaining elements of an elliptical specificational copular sentence within an indirect question, it will be shown that the type of noun, though irrelevant for the licensing of this kind of structure, plays an important role in its interpretation.

Japanese embedded questions are nominal: Evidence from quantificational variability effect

The exhaustivity of an embedded interrogative sentence can be altered by the presence of an adverb in the matrix clause. This phenomenon, known as Quantificational Variability Effect (QVE), manifests itself in a peculiar way in Japanese. A QVE-inducing adverb can take the form of a numeral classifier that agrees with the embedded Wh-phrase. While a QVE-inducing numeral classifier appears to be associated with an embedded wh-phrase, it is not clear how such an association can be established. I argue that Japanese embedded questions are implicitly nominalized in the fashion similar to the internally-headed relative clause construction, and that the nominalized embedded questions are treated as concealed questions. The proposed analysis gives a very simple account for the puzzling QVE construction, as the floated quantifier structure with a concealed-question-denoting NP is commonplace. The paper examines a variety of phenomena, such as doubly headed relative clause structure and selectional restrictions on QVE, which support the nominal structure of Japanese embedded questions.