Are WH-words really ‘interrogative’?
Keywords:
interrogative, pronouns, question, interpretation, aspect, speech, intonational, clauseAbstract
The following article discusses the status of WH-words for interrogative interpretations, and show that the derivation of constituent questions evolves from a specific interplay of syntactic and semantic representations with pragmatics. The article argues that WH-pronouns are not ‘interrogative’. Rather, they are underspecified elements; due to this underspecification, WH-words can form a constitutive part not only of interrogative, but also of exclamative and declarative clauses. WH-words introduce a variable of a particular conceptual domain into the semantic representation. Accordingly, they have to be specified for interpretation. Different WH-contexts give rise to different interpretations.
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