On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Yes / No-Questions , Yes / No-Question Disjunctions , and Alternative Questions Evidence from Chadic

In a large variety of languages, interrogative markers are closely related in form to disjunctive coordinators. Despite appearance to the contrary, the pertinent semantic question theories cannot explain this formal correlation. The framework of inquisitive semantics developed in this paper provides a natural explanation. The inquisitive-semantic analysis of yes/no-question carries over to yes/no-question disjunctions and alternative questions, but it needs to be supplemented, most notably, by a theory of focus. The paper proposes an inquisitive-semantic variant of the alternative semantics of focus and argues that the question operator is focus sensitive. This provides an account of various focus effects in non-wh-questions.

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