Deniz Özyıldız Seminar

Rethinking Questions

We are actively trying to understand how to account for the distribution and interpretation of embedded questions: Why do know and wonder embed them but not (usually) think? Why do we have to hedge and add (usually) to statements like the previous one? And why does know plus a question imply belief, when wonder plus the same thing implies the opposite? These are some traditional questions that are currently being scrutinized under a new light.

Our quest for answers will involve making sense of challenging data, re-visiting the classics, and moving towards a bubbling new set of contributions. While the main point will be that there is much more left to be said, we will be thinking how presuppositions should be harnessed to rescue embedded questions from giving rise to semantic deviance, and how the part-whole structure of events might be used to derive both the acceptability and the meaning of certain question directed attitudes.