This paper investigates how the distribution of negative polarity items can inform our understanding of the underlying semantic representation of constituent questions. It argues that the distribution of NPIs in questions is governed by the same logical properties that govern their distribution in declarative constructions. Building on an observation due to Guerzoni and Sharvit that strength of exhaustivity in questions correlates with the acceptability of NPIs, I propose a revision of the semantics of questions that can explain this link in (...) terms already familiar from the literature of negative polarity, namely the availability of a local downward entailing environment. I argue for a new theory of questions that takes strength of exhaustivity to be encoded internal to the question nucleus rather than in different answer-hood operators. This switch, while conceptually a simple move, has far-reaching consequences in the domain of questions. I also show how this new analysis can account for a host of issues related to NPIs, such as the subject–object asymmetry noted by Han and Siegel, the interaction between NPIs and high versus low wh-adjuncts, the varying acceptability of NPIs in the restrictor of which-phrases, and the contrast between weak and strong NPIs. (shrink)

This paper considers two of the most prominent kinds of evidence that have been used to argue that certain embedded questions receive weakly exhaustive interpretations. The first kind is exemplified by judgments of consistency for declarative sentences that attribute knowledge of a wh-question and ignorance of the negation of that question to the same person, and the second concerns asymmetries between the role of positive and negative information in validating question-embedding surprise ascriptions, and similar judgments for other attitudes. I argue (...) that neither type suffices to show weak exhaustivity. The first can be analyzed in terms of strong exhaustivity in combination with domain restriction effects, while the second can be analyzed in terms of a mention-some interpretation. These kinds of evidence have served as the empirical basis for many claims about weakly exhaustive readings, so the observation that they are unreliable calls into questions a large body of established work on the semantics of question embedding. (shrink)

This article presents a new criticisms of reductive approaches to knowledge-‘wh’ (i.e., those approaches on which whether one stands in the knowledge-‘wh’ relation to a question is determined by whether one stands in the knowledge-‘that’ relation to some answer(s) to the question). It argues in particular that the truth of a knowledge-‘wh’ attribution like ‘Janna knows where she can buy an Italian newspaper’ depends not only on what Janna knows about the availability of Italian newspapers, but on what she believes (...) about the matter. This dependence of Janna's knowledge-‘wh’ on her (possibly false) beliefs is incompatible with the reductive approach. (shrink)