Direct questions such as “Who saw Mary?” intuitively request for a certain type of answer, for instance a noun phrase “John” or a quantified noun phrase such as “A man”. Following the structured meaning approach to questions, we propose an analysis of wh-questions in typelogical grammar that incorporates the requirement for a certain type of answer into the type assigned to wh-phrases. Interest...

This study set out to investigate how accent placement is pragmatically governed in WH-questions. Central to this issue are questions such as whether the intonation of the WH-word depends on the information structure of the non-WH word part, whether topical constituents can be accented, and whether constituents in the non-WH word part can be nontopical and accented. Previous approaches, based e...

In Japanese a certain kind of phrase, which Kuroda (1965) calls "indetenninate", can function as a wh-phrase, existential quantifier or universal quantifier depending on context and the use of particles. I argue that "indetenninates" are contrastive-focused, and that the meanings of existential and universal quantifiers are made of (in)finite application of disjunction ("ka") and conjunction ("...