The Indefiniteness and Focusing of Question Words

Question words show striking similarities among the languages of the world: They are typically morphologically related to indefinites and they are typically, if not universally, focused.1 These two properties have been semantically accounted for in various ways, but so far they have not been integrated into a single coherent theory. I will show that an integration can be achieved by combining two independently motivated accounts, which up to now have not been considered together. The analysis arrived at will be shown to yield a number of answerhood conditions that are left unexplained by the pertinent semantic theories of questions and to explain intervention effects in wh-questions.

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