Disjunctive questions, intonation, and highlighting

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.