Lexical Selection and Quantificational Variability in Embedded Interrogatives

Abstract

In this paper, I have provided an analysis of Quantificational Variability in embedded interrogatives, and extended the account to focus-affected readings one finds with interrogative complements of some predicates like tell. I assumed that although embedded interrogatives are uniformly of the type of questions Q, a predicate like wonder is of type (Q, (e,t)) and a predicate like know is of type ((s,t), (e,t)). The difference in the interpretation comes about because of the way sentences containing these predicates are interpreted. In other words, the relevant difference between the two classes of predicates resides in the predicates themselves rather that the interrogative complements they take. In the last part of my paper, I compared my approach with that of the alternative of Berman (1991) where the phenomenon was first observed