Abstract
In this chapter we will apply the syntactic and semantic framework for Swedish developed in the previous chapter to the interpretation of constituent questions. One reason that we have chosen this particular construction is that it provides a good illustration of the issue we brought up in Chapter I, namely that in order to evaluate a given account of some linguistic problem, it is not sufficient to look at the problem only from a syntactic point of view or only from a semantic point of view. One could conceivably work out syntactic or semantic approaches which are extremely elegant and simple within their own domain but which entail ad hoc solutions in other areas. It is not until we look at the interaction of the syntactic and semantic rules that we are in a position to judge their relative adequacy for a given natural language. Providing a syntax and semantics for constituent questions in Swedish turns out to be a good area in which to illustrate how semantic considerations may simplify the syntactic description.
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