Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Why Surprise-Predicates do not Embed Polar Interrogatives
By Klaus Abels
This paper is about the observation that certain predicates (like be surprised) do not embed polar interrogatives, i.e.*John is surprised whether Mary was a the party.Developing insights by Heim (1994) and d'Avis (2001, 2002), I claim that this observation follows from the independently motivated presuppositions of predicates like 'be surprised' and, crucially, the assumption that polar interrogatives denote singleton sets of propositions. Special clause type features as proposed for example in Grimshaw (1979) turn out not to be necessary.
Reference: lingBuzz/000061
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 17 December 2004 22:58 GMT
