Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
The interpretation and meaning of concealed questions
By Lance Nathan
Syntactic and semantic selection of complements have long been considered idiosyncratic facts about verbs. For instance, among verbs that can take clausal questions as complements (John {knew/ asked/ cared/ wondered} what time it was), lexical items vary as to whether, semantically, they accept clausal propositions (John {knew/ *asked/ cared/ *wondered} that it was 3:00) and whether, syntactically, they accept question-denoting noun phrases, or "concealed questions" (John {knew/ asked/ *cared/ *wondered} the time). In this paper I argue that the distribution of concealed questions is not arbitrary and therefore the ability to embed them does not need to be specified as part of the lexical entry of the verb.
Let me see it
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 BST
Updated: Sunday, 31 October 2004 09:54 BST
