A semantics for superficial and embedded questions in natural language
Richard Hull · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 1975
We shall propose in this paper a formal semantics for elementary embedded questions, such as John knows which student Mary invited, John can't remember who left early , etc. The semantics for these sentences will be stated in terms of that for the corresponding ‘direct’ questions, e.g. Which student did Mary invite?, Who left early? , etc. So I shall first review the semantics of elementary direct questions, as proposed in Keenan and Hull (1973), and then generalize the analysis to cover the case of embedded questions: Direct questions The intuition We consider a question such as (1): (1) Which student did Mary invite? to be basically a request for the identification of the student who Mary invited. An answer to the question is, linguistically, a noun phrase that refers to that individual. It might be an alternative description such as the student who won first prize , or perhaps just an elementary referring expression such as John , or even him . If the noun phrase does refer to the student in question, then it is a true answer to the question; otherwise, it is not. In our semantics, then, question-answer pairs determine truth values. Questions themselves are, semantically, the sort of thing that makes a proposition from an answer phrase, but they do not themselves carry truth values. The basis of our semantics of questions lies in the definition of truth and falsehood for question-answer pairs – that is, in the definition of the question-answer relation.