This paper revisits two fundamental issues in question semantics—what does a question mean, and how is this meaning compositionally derived? Drawing on observations with the distribution of wh-words in questions and free relatives as well as quantificational variability effects in question-embeddings, I argue that the nominal meanings of short answers must be derivable from question denotations, which therefore calls for a categorial approach to defining questions, including embedded questions. I provide a novel hybrid categorial approach to compose questions. This approach (...) overcomes the problems with traditional categorial approaches in defining bare wh-indefinites, composing multi-wh questions, and accounting for coordinations of questions. (shrink)

Traditional logical theories are concerned with the characterization of valid reasoning. For such logical theories, the main object of investigation is the notion of entailment, a notion that is construed as a relation between two or more declarative statements, dictating when one of them can be legitimately inferred from the others. In the course of the previous century, however, and especially since the 1970s, the scope of logical theories has become much broader. In particular, logic is no longer only concerned (...) with declarative statements, but also with questions. Accordingly, the field is no longer focusing exclusively on the entailment relation that may hold between two or more statements, but also aims to characterize fundamental relations that may hold between questions, or between questions and statements. For instance, when does a statement resolve a given question? When does a statement evoke a certain question? And when does the resolution of one question depend on the resolu .. (shrink)