2 - Interpreting questions

Summary

In this paper I want to draw together a number of observations bearing on how people interpret constituent questions. The observations concern the interpretation possibilities for “moved” and “unmoved” wh-phrases, as well as wide scope interpretation of quantifiers in embedded sentences. I will argue that languages typically display a correlation between positions that do not allow extractions and positions where a constituent cannot be interpreted with wide scope. Given this correlation, it seems natural to investigate the processes of extraction and wide-scope interpretation from the perspective of sentence processing, in the hope of explaining correlations between the two. I have singled out constituent questions because they illustrate the parsing problem for sentences with nonlocal filler-gap dependencies; they are a particularly interesting case to consider because of interactions between scope determining factors and general interpretive strategies for filler-gap association.

Gap-filling

To what extent is the process of gap-filling sensitive to formal, as opposed to semantic, properties of the linguistic input? One type of evidence that is relevant here is the existence of a morphological dependency between the filler and the environment of the gap, as illustrated in (1).

1. (1) a. Which people did Mary say — were invited to dinner?

2. b. *Which people did Mary say — was invited to dinner?

In languages with productive case marking, a similar type of dependency will hold between the case of the filler and the local environment of the gap. This kind of morphological agreement is typically determined by properties having to do with the surface form of the items in question, or with inherent formal properties, such as which noun class a given noun belongs to.