This paper presents a substantially revised version of the theory developed in my thesis, Ginzburg 1992a, and in Ginzburg 1992b. All acknowledgements from those works carry over to the present one. In particular, I would like to thank my adviser Stanley Peters for many useful suggestions and encouragement. I would particularly like to thank Robin Cooper: many of the ideas in this current paper arose as a result of joint work, reported in Cooper and Ginzburg 1993, and currently emerging as Cooper and Ginzburg (in progress). I would also like to thank Enric Vallduv'i for extensive comments on an earlier draft and much moral and schm/boozal support, David Milward for many useful suggestions, comments on a draft and occasional skepticism, Elisabet Engdahl for stimulating discussion, the members of the MaC group in Edinburgh and audiences at the 1993 LSA summer institute and the LSA/ASL conference on Logic and Linguistics both at Columbus, Ohio.

Making linguistic theory is like specifying a programming language...

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I present a strictly compositional semantics of interrogatives in English that accounts for these properties. Specifically, in my analysis, � there is no covert movement or wh-raising between surface syntax and denotational semantics (contra Epstein’s (1992) economy account), yet a single denotation suffices for both raised and in-situ appearances of each wh-phrase. Moreover, � as a natural consequence of the denotation of wh-phrases and the rules of the grammar, only in-situ wh-phrases can take scope ambiguously. I describe my system below as one where, roughly speaking, interrogative clauses denote functions from answers to propositions (an old idea). However, such denotations are not crucial for my purposes—the essential ideas in my analysis carry over easily to a system where interrogative clauses denote say sets of propositions instead. Hence this paper bears not so much on what interrogatives denote, but how. My analysis builds upon Barker’s (2000a, 2000b) use ofcontinuations to characterize quantification in natural language. In Section 2, I introduce continuation

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Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, whose central assumption is that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression?z.P (α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration. The paper closes with some remarks on the distribution of concealed questions, in comparison with that of interrogative and declarative complement clauses. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at SALT in 2008, at the Frequently