Quantificational Variability I: Adverbial Modification of Embedded Interrogatives

Abstract

Abstract Predicates of the know-class include predicates like realize, forget, tell, guess, etc. whereas predicates of the wonder-type include predicates like ask, investigate, etc. This distinction is often taken to imply that interrogatives embedded under the two kinds of predicates differ syntactically and/or semantically. In this chapter, I provide an analysis of quantificational variability in embedded interrogatives, starting with the premise that embedded interrogative complements of both the know-class of predicates and the wonder-class predicates are identical in semantic type, the semantic type of Questions. The different behavior of the two classes of predicates follows from the way they are interpreted when a predicate like know, which is of the type ⟪s, t⟩, ⟩e, t⟫ (a predicate that would normally take a proposition as an argument) takes a Question as an argument.