Syntax and Semantics of Questions

This paper presents a novel account of the syntax and semantics of questions, making use of the framework for linguistic description developed by Richard Montague (1974). Certain features of the proposal are based on work by N. Belnap (1963), L. Aqvist (1965), C. L. Baker (1968, 1970), S. Kuno and J. Robinson (1972), C. L. Hamblin (1973), E. Keenan and R. Hull (1973), J. Hintikka (1974), Lewis (1975), and D. Wunderlich (1975), but it differs from all of its predecessors in one way or another. I will start with a number of observations which provide the basis for the treatment of questions presented in the second part of the paper and conclude with a summary and a brief discussion of how the proposed description compares with recent transformational analyses.

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