This book presents a novel analysis of concealed-question constructions, reports of a mental attitude in which part of a sentence looks like a nominal complement, but is interpreted as an indirect question. Such constructions are puzzling in that they raise the question of how their meaning derives from their constituent parts. In particular, how a nominal complement, normally used to refer to an entity ends up with a question-like meaning. In this book, Ilaria Frana adopts a theory according to which (...) noun phrases with concealed question meanings are analysed as individual concepts. The traditional individual concept theory is modified and applied to the phenomena discussed in the recent literature and some new problematic data. The end result is a fully compositional account of a wide range of concealed-question constructions. The exploration of concealed questions offered in the book provides insights into both issues in semantic theory, such as the nature of quantification in natural languages and the use of type shifter in the grammar, and issues surrounding the syntax-semantics interface, such as the interpretation of copy traces and the effects on semantic interpretation of different syntactic analyses of relative clauses. The book will interest scholars and graduate students in linguistics, especially those interested in semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, as well as philosophers of language working on the topic of intensionality. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019 ). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022 ). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a (...) battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. ( 2007 ) with Schlenker’s ( 2007 ) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007 ) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel treatment of quantified concealed questions , examining different types of NP predicates and deriving the truth conditions for pair-list and set readings. A generalization is proposed regarding the distribution of the two readings, namely that pair-list readings arise from CQs with relational head nouns, whereas set readings arise from CQs whose head nouns are not relational. It is shown that set readings cannot be derived under the ‘individual concept’ approach, one of the most influential analyses (...) of CQs on the market. The paper offers a solution to this problem. It shows that once we adopt an independently motivated view of traces—according to which traces are copies with descriptive content —nothing else needs to be postulated to derive set readings within an individual-concept-based analysis. Thus, what seemed to be a challenge for this type of analysis turns out to be an argument in its favor. (shrink)