A Uniform Semantics for Declarative and Interrogative Complements
Nadine Theiler, Floris Roelofsen, Maria Daria Aloni · Journal of Semantics · 2018
This paper proposes a semantics for declarative and interrogative complements and for so-called responsive verbs, like know and forget, which embed both kinds of complements.Following Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984), we pursue a uniform account in the sense that we take both kinds of complements to be of the same semantic type and we assume a single lexical entry for each responsive verb.This approach avoids a number of problems for non-uniform theories, such as the reductive theories of Karttunen (1977), Heim (1994), Lahiri (2002), Spector & Egré (2015), among others, and the twin relations theory of George (2011).On the other hand, our account also addresses the main limitation of Groenendijk & Stokhof's (1984) proposal, which is that it is primarily designed to derive strongly exhaustive readings for interrogative complements.Our account is more flexible in that it straightforwardly derives non-exhaustive and intermediate exhaustive readings as well.In this paper, we develop a uniform theory of clause embedding, i.e., a theory on which declarative and interrogative complements have the same semantic type.On such an account, every responsive verb can be associated with a single lexical entry, applying to declarative and interrogative complements alike.By contrast, most existing approaches to clausal complements are non-uniform.At least since Karttunen (1977), it is usually assumed that declarative and interrogative complements