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Share Paper 1234

The Interpretation of Concealed Questions
Lance Nathan
290-298 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Concealed questions (CQs) are DPs interpreted as questions when they are complements of question-embedding verbs, such as Kim knows the capital of Vermont or Leslie has forgotten the price of milk. This paper proposes two new semantic answers to the question of CQ distribution. First, it shows that predicates are not idiosyncratic in terms of CQ-embedding, but that a question-embedding predicate can embed a concealed question if and only if it can embed a proposition. Second, it demonstrates that there are two different kinds of CQ with somewhat different distributions.

Published in

Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by John Alderete, Chung-hye Han, and Alexei Kochetov
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00