Semantic Characterizations of German Question-Embedding Predicates
نویسندگان
چکیده
The paper investigates the conditions under which German twoplace verbs like wissen dass 'know' and bedauern dass 'regret' embed interrogatives. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for a dassverb to have an ob-form. The corresponding verbs we call objective. An objective verb has a wh-form (F weiß, wer kommt 'F knows who is coming') if it satisfies a further condition stating that it has to be consistent with wissen dass. A non-objective dass-verb does not have an ob-form, but it can have a wh-form if it permits a daor es-correlate and meets particular consistency conditions which render it factive or cognitive in the presence of the correlate (cf. bedauern 'regret' vs. annehmen 'assume') It turns out that the meaning of the wh-form of non-objective verbs deviates distinctly from the meaning of the wh-form of objective verbs. Unlike other approaches our rules are general and hold without exceptions.
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