A uniform semantics for embedded interrogatives: an answer, not necessarily the answer

Our paper addresses the following question: is there a general characterization, for all predicates P that take both declarative and interrogative complements (responsive predicates in Lahiri’s 2002 typology), of the meaning of the P-interrogative clause construction in terms of the meaning of the P-declarative clause construction? On our account, if P is a reponsive predicate and Q a question embedded under P, then the meaning of ‘P+Q’ is, informally, “to be in the relation expressed by P to some potential complete answer to Q”. We show that this rule allows us to derive veridical and non-veridical readings of embedded questions, depending on whether the embedding verb is veridical, and provide novel empirical evidence supporting the generalization. We then enrich our basic proposal to account for the presuppositions induced by the embedding verbs, as well as for the generation of weakly exhaustive readings of embedded questions (in particular after surprise). A semantic theory of interrogative sentences must achieve at least two goals. One goal is to provide an account predicting, for any question, what counts as a felicitous answer, and how an answer is interpreted in the context of a given question. Such an account can then be extended to deal with the dynamics of dialogue. A second goal is to account for the semantic contribution of interrogative clauses when they occur embedded in a declarative sentence. To achieve these two goals, a natural strategy consists in developing a compositional semantics for interrogatives which associates to any interrogative sentence a well-defined semantic value, on the basis of which both the question-answer relation and the truth-conditional contribution of interrogatives in declarative sentences can be characterized in a natural way. A number of influential theories have such a structure, viz. theories based on a Hamblin-Karttunen type semantics (Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977), those based on partition semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984), as well as theories that unify both approaches (Heim 1994, Beck & Rullman 1999, Guerzoni & Sharvit 2007). In this paper, we are concerned with the second goal, that is we aim to contribute to a general theory of the way embedded interrogatives are interpreted. We will specifically address only a subpart of the relevant empirical domain, namely cases where an interrogative sentence is embedded under a verb or a predicate which can also embed a declarative sentence. As we will see, with one recent exception, no currently available theory is able to achieve what would seem like the main desideratum, namely to derive in full generality, without specific, idiosyncratic lexical stipulations, the meaning resulting from embedding an interrogative clause under a predicate that can also embed a declarative sentence. *Acknowledgments to be added. 1 The exception is Ben George (2011), which partly builds on the ideas we present here. Those ideas were first presented at the MIT LingLunch in 2007 and at the Journées de Sémantique et de Modélisation 2008 and in a detailed hand-out form (http://lumiere.ens.fr/~bspector/Webpage/handout_mit_Egre&SpectorFinal.pdf). Our discussions in section V are related to George’s work, which we do not discuss extensively.