Disjunctive questions, intonation, and highlighting
Floris Roelofsen, Sam van Gool

Abstract:
This paper examines how intonation affects the interpretation of
disjunctive questions. The semantic effect of a question is taken to
be three-fold. First, it raises an issue. In the tradition of
inquisitive semantics, we model this by assuming that a question
proposes several possible updates of the common ground (several
possibilities for short) and invites other participants to help
establish at least one of these updates. But apart from raising an
issue, a question may also highlight and/or suggest certain
possibilities, and intonation determines to a large extent which
possibilities are highlighted/suggested. We will introduce a
compositional version of inquisitive semantics, and extend this
framework in order to capture the highlighting- and suggestion
potential of sentences. This will lead to a systematic account of the
answerhood conditions and implications of disjunctive questions with
different intonation patterns.