Title: Embedded interrogatives and selection of sentential complements in the lexicon
Abstract: Combination properties of predicates and their complements have been long-standing issues for a theory of selection and/or subcategorization. This paper deals with verbs taking sentential complements, especially those occurring with embedded questions, and discusses what syntactic/semantic characteristics need to be specified in the lexicon to explain selectional properties of those verbs. Depending on the classes of embedding verbs, interrogatives are interpreted as either genuine questions or (resolving) answers to questions, which Suner (1993) accounts for by [±Qu] distinction of embedded questions, indicated in the subcategorization frames of verbs. This paper points out problems with Suner's proposal, and provides lexical entries of verbs in which such distinction is manifested by two different verb relations, resolutive and non-resolutive. With the MARKING feature in HPSG, the proposed analysis also accounts for the distribution of the complementizer que in Spanish, which remains problemantic in Suner. Further investigation of English and Korean data shows that complementizer selection needs to be specified lexically in these lanuguages as well, by the account based on the MARKING feature and feature underspecification.
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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