Dynamic wh-terms

Abstract

The grammatical analysis of wh-questions presented in Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982 does not account for the close affinity between indefinite and interrogative pro nouns. However, wh-terms can be treated in the same way as indefinites if existential quantification is dynamic. In this paper, the question denotations of G&S (1982) are reproduced in a dynamic framework in which wh-terms translate as existential GQs. In addition to this, the syntactic and semantic consequences for explaining the intervention effect in wh-questions are explored.