Coordinating Questions
Morwenna Hoeks

Abstract:
This thesis explores how a well-founded and uniform compositional account can be given of coordinated questions. First, the empirical picture of question coordination is explored by making a direct comparison between conjunctive, disjunctive, and polar questions. Some surprising observations are discussed, which show that conjunctive questions always correspond to conjunctions of polar questions (PolQs), while disjunctive questions can never be analyzed as disjunctions of PolQs. The proposed account allows us to express several different readings of disjunctive questions, thereby deriving the differences between those readings from the interplay between their intonation, discourse effects, and underlying syntactic structure. In particular, it is argued that the contribution of the question operator should be split up into two components: a component that introduces a presupposition and a component that deals with the at issue question meaning. The way these two components interact is taken to be the crucial difference between PolQs and AltQs. The difference between AltQs and conjunctive questions is explained by making reference to their effects on discourse.