Concealed questions without meta-meta-questions

Abstract

Sentences like John knows the price that Fred knows are ambiguous between ‘Reading A’ and ‘Reading B’. When such sentences have a further embedding, existing analyses predict ‘Reading C’ that involves meta-meta-questions. This paper presents an analysis in which the escalating ambiguity disappears when the referent of concealed question DP has a proper name. I show that Reading C is reduced to a version of Reading B without meta-meta-questions. The proposal is based on the idea that questions are given different interpretations depending on the perspective taken to identify entities in the domain.