Scope ambiguities in future questions: Reflection and 'queclamative' with Italian 'mica'

Abstract

The paper studies the interpretation of Italian future questions with and without MICA. While bare future questions are reflective and enhance uncertainty, MICA future questions reveal bias, if not mirativity, and are exclamative in nature. We argue that these differences are grounded in a difference in scope. When FUT scopes over QUES, the question becomes reflective and enhances un-answerability. When QUES embeds the modal FUT the resulting interpretation is ill-formed. MICA offers the content needed to repair the question, contributing an alternative. This alternative has an expressive status whose content is adjoined by expressive application, and is thereby highlighted, with the enhancement of bias. Our paper offers three main insights: (i), modals, like attitudes, can embed sets of propositions. (iii) Expressive content can be adjoined to questions, creating an exclamative biased questions, which we call queclamative. (iii) Italian MICA belongs to the broad class of mirative evidentials sensitive to defeasible generalization rather than to the one of common ground management devices.