Abstract
This paper focuses on inquisitive information-seeking utterances with non-fronted wh -words and declarative word order, which I dub wh -declaratives (WhDec), e.g., the party is where? Though they have not received much attention in the literature, they present an interesting theoretical puzzle: despite looking like declaratives syntactically, they receive an inquisitive interpretation, and yet they are not always interchangeable with (canonical) wh -interrogatives (WhQs). In this paper I use WhDecs as a window to explore how, by taking into account the interaction between semantics, discourse structure and dynamic updates, we can derive subtle interpretational differences while keeping the overall interpretation true to form. The paper also addresses the interaction of sentential force and prosody, extending the discussion of WhDecs to rising declaratives and examining the contribution of the nuclear contour in the construction of meaning. Along the way, I build on previous literature to provide a semantics for WhQs and WhDecs that bridges to pragmatics explaining the contextual dependence of the so-called existential presupposition in questions. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
This paper focuses on inquisitive information-seeking utterances with non-fronted wh-words and declarative word order, which I dub wh-declaratives (WhDec), e.g., the party is where? Though they have not received much attention in the literature, they present an interesting theoretical puzzle: despite looking like declaratives syntactically, they receive an inquisitive interpretation, and yet they are not always interchangeable with wh-interrogatives (WhQs)
The proposal in this paper offers an analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of WhDecs making use of independently motivated ingredients
The analysis ends up deriving why an utterance with declarative word order can be inquisitive without appealing to ad-hoc solutions at LF and is in line with analyses of related phenomena such as rising declaratives (RDecs) that try to keep the interpretation of the utterance true to form
Summary
This paper focuses on inquisitive information-seeking utterances with non-fronted wh-words and declarative word order. Canonical examples of wh-interrogatives (WhQs) involve a wh-word at the front and, compared to declaratives, reverse the relative order of subject and auxiliary. This latter property is shared by polar interrogatives (PolQs). Less studied are English utterances with declarative word order and a non-fronted wh-word that are not echo questions (see Bartels 1999 and references therein). These are the focus of this paper, WhDecs:.
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