Maribel Romero: Pluralities in Concealed Questions, Interrogative Clauses and Individuals

Concealed questions NPs like the underlined NP in John knows / guessed the capital of Italy  have been analysed as contributing their intension --an individual concept-- to the semantic computation (Heim 1979, Romero 2005, Aloni 2008). However, problems arise with concealed questions with quantifiers, which has lead researchers to deviate from the individual concept approach. This paper proposes a solution to the problem within the invididual concept line. The key idea is that, in the same way that adverbials like to some extent and for the most part quantify over subquestions of an embedded question (Beck and Sharvit 2002), some and most can quantify over sub-individual concepts of a concealed question.

Furthermore, it will be shown that certain constraints on determiner and adverbial quantification over concealed questions are parallel to those over (plain) plural individuals.