Rebecca Woods (University of Huddersfield)
Embedded Inverted Questions (EIQs) as Conventional Implicatures: a QUD-based approach
Abstract:
In this talk I will claim that embedded inverted questions (EIQs) in the sense of McCloskey (2006) and my own work are not complements to attitude verbs, but appositive relative clauses (ARCs) that modify a (usually, but not exclusively) silent nominal argument to the verb. In addition to presenting syntactic arguments to support this analysis, I will use a Question-Under-Discussion approach to show that EIQs are, like other ARCs, conventional implicatures that, like other ARCs, may be at-issue given the right context. I tie this back into the literature on embedded speech acts, especially concerning embedded verb second in German and Mainland Scandinavian, to suggest that this non-complementation approach, which was rejected by Truckenbrodt (2006) for German embedded verb second, might yet turn out to be fruitful.