QUANTIFYING INTO QUESTION ACTS

• Published in: Natural language semantics Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 1 - 40
• Main Author: KRIFKA, MANFRED
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Boolean data; Descriptive studies and applied theories; Lexical quantifiers; Linguistics; Logical conjunctions; Noun phrases; Pasta; Puddings; Quantification; Quantifiers; Questions; Salads; Semantics; Semantics and pragmatics; Speech acts; Verbs; Speech act; Logical semantics; Scope; Quantification; Semantic interpretation; Embedding; Formalization; Question; Pragmatics
• ISSN: 0925-854X; 1572-865X
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1017903702063

Quantified NPs in questions may lead to an interpretation in which the NP quantifies into the question. Which dish did every guest bring? can be understood as: 'For every guest x: which dish did x bring?'. After a review of previous approaches that tried to capture this quantification formally or to explain it away, it is argued that such readings involve quantification into speech acts. As the algebra of speech acts is more limited than a Boolean algebra - it only contains conjunction, not disjunction or negation - it is predicted that only universal quantifiers can scope out of questions or other speech acts. The approach is extended to indirect questions, which either are embedded speech acts or coerced to denote the true answers, depending on the embedding verb; in the latter case a Boolean structure results, and we find wide-scope readings of non-universal quantifiers.