Interesting interrogatives

Abstract

The stem interest has two syntactic variants that occur with both declarative and interrogative subordinate clauses. The presuppositions that such constructions carry are difficult to explain under predominant theories of how similar predicates semantically compose with subordinate clauses. I offer a new analysis, which puts together some ideas already found in this literature – in particular, the idea that certain interrogative clauses semantically encode (something like) the illocutionary force of asking and the idea that experiencer predicates (such as interest) are associated with acquaintance inferences.