Abstract

This work concerns itself with characterising the different types of contents that arise from uses of interrogative sentences, describing what meanings get associated with particular interrogative sentences, and explaining how these get put together compositionally on the basis of the meaning of their constituents, with particular attention to the meaning of interrogative phrases. ;Within most recent work in linguistic semantics, questions, the contents of query uses of interrogatives, have been analysed reductively as higher order propositional objects. The current work argues against such an analysis. In its stead a view of questions is offered wherein these constitute the subclass of singular propositional entities, unresolved states-of-affairs , those that contain one or more argument roles of the propositional entity with whom no entity is associated. This view provides for an inherently richer notion of answerhood that is at the same time based on entities that are more plausibly available to cognitive agents engaged in querying. The need for a richer notion of answerhood is prompted by our demonstration that the class of answers to any given question--contents that can be conveyed by acceptable responses--has been considerably under-recognized in past work. An important gain made by the proposed approach is that it reveals and provides a simple account of systematic and cross-linguistically stable contrasts in the ability of a predicate to take an interrogative meaning as an argument. ;Our proposal for characterising the meaning of interrogative expressions argues that there exist three independent classes of uses which interrogative phrases can undergo, which we dub independent, dependent, and reprise uses. We argue extensively against an assumption common to most past work that interrogatives should be viewed as quantifiers on either syntactic or semantic grounds. We propose that dependent and reprise uses of interrogative expressions are each particular instances of use-types applicable to non-interrogative expressions. Dependent uses include bound variable anaphora as an instance. Reprise uses comprehend quotative uses of declarative sentences. We show how combining the general characteristics of each use type with the characterisation of independent interrogative uses we provide enables the defining conditions pertaining to these additional interrogative uses to be derived. This allows for a simple and comprehensive account of the available interrogative meanings