Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg)
Title: Structuring Concealed Questions
Time: Wednesday, October 2nd, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Concealed Questions (CQs) are DPs that can be naturally paraphrased as embedded questions, e.g., “I know [Ann’s birthday]” <=> “I know [what Ann’s birthday is]”. This talk, like most of the literature on CQs, is focused on two puzzles identified by Heim (1979): (i) the ambiguity of quantified CQs, and (ii) the ambiguity of nested CQs. I build on Romero (2005) and Frana (2017) to advance a novel account of these ambiguities that synthesizes these works’ main insights into a general theory of quantification over individual concepts. A key feature of my proposal is that the ambiguities identified by Heim are due to the internal structure of the NPs within CQs.