In the semantics and pragmatics literature, a variety of components of meanings have been identified, such as presuppositions, implicatures, anti-presuppositions, etc. These phenomena have often been analyzed in terms of competition between the utterance and its potential alternatives: we relate what was said to what could have been said and derive a richer meaning out of this comparison. Crucially, the way in which this competition is typically formulated is tied to the truth conditions of the utterance and its alternatives. However, the same sort of rich pragmatic content is also found in non-declarative utterances and in particular in questions, which are not usually thought to have truth conditions.

The goal of this project is to explore how to integrate questions, and, ultimately, all non-declaratives into our understanding of the semantics/pragmatics interface. To this end, we will investigate the reflexes of well-known interface phenomena such as scalar implicatures etc. in questions, using both introspective and experimental data, and seek to develop models of pragmatic competition that can apply to utterances without truth conditions. In particular, we propose to ground pragmatic competition in the potential continuations of utterances.