Abstract
In his dissertation, Stephen Berman observed thatwh‐words in questions embedded under certain verbs seem to inherit their quantificational force from adverbs of quantification in the higher clause. The knowledge inI mostly know who leftis interpreted to correspond to most of the leavers. Berman argued that this serves as a counterexample to proposals such as Groenendijk and Stokhof's that make strong exhaustivity a definitional property of the semantic representation of questions. This chapter reviews the restrictions on where the quantificational variability effect (QVE) is observed, and assesses the impact of these observations on the various major accounts of question semantics. The existence of QVE opens a window into the internal structure of questions/answers, potentially providing insight into what components of a question might be being quantified over in such cases.
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