English

A continuation semantics of interrogatives that accounts for Baker's ambiguity

Computation and Language 2007-05-23 v2 Programming Languages

Abstract

Wh-phrases in English can appear both raised and in-situ. However, only in-situ wh-phrases can take semantic scope beyond the immediately enclosing clause. I present a denotational semantics of interrogatives that naturally accounts for these two properties. It neither invokes movement or economy, nor posits lexical ambiguity between raised and in-situ occurrences of the same wh-phrase. My analysis is based on the concept of continuations. It uses a novel type system for higher-order continuations to handle wide-scope wh-phrases while remaining strictly compositional. This treatment sheds light on the combinatorics of interrogatives as well as other kinds of so-called A'-movement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0207070,
  title  = {A continuation semantics of interrogatives that accounts for Baker's ambiguity},
  author = {Chung-chieh Shan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0207070},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

20 pages; typo fixed