Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Quantity Concealed Questions?

Speaker Jon Ander Mendia
Affiliaton(s) Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Date CANCELLED! 15.12.2022
Time 12:30 o'clock
Venue ZAS seminar room 403 and Zoom

Abstract

Concealed Questions (CQs) involve DPs that are interpreted as questions, typically when they appear as complements to embedding verbs such as know, say, guess, etc. While there exist a number of analyses of such constructions, they all attempt at deriving two restrictions: the inability of verbs like wonder to form CQs (e.g. *I wonder the capital of Italy), and the fact that CQs always denote identity questions about some entity, (equivalent to whoIwhat questions, and not where, when, etc.). Spanish however allows examples such as (1), where an interpretation as a how many question is possible.

(1) Juan se pregunta las manzanas que trajo María

      Juan wonders     the.PL apples.PL that brought María

      Juan wonders how many apples Maria brought.

This talk examines the properties and distribution the CQ constructions that allow this type of quantity interpretations. I will present some evidence suggesting that this CQs may after all not involve full DPs but CPs "in disguise" and may not need to be accounted for our theory of CQs.