Satisfying Questions

Abstract

In this paper we first combine and refine the semantics of questions and answers (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984) and the logic of interrogation (Groenendijk 1999) in order to deal with topical restriction, constituent answerhood and conditional questions in a compo- sitional way. The proposal builds on insights from the structured meanings approaches to questions (von Stechow 1991; Krifka 1991). We next present a global, pragmatic perspec- tive on the use of such questions and answers, which founds and furthers work of (Bu¨ ring 1999; Ginzburg 1996; Roberts 1996) on information structure.