UC Santa Cruz

Responsive Predicates (ResPs)–those clausal-embedding predicates which permit both declarative or interrogative complements, like know and say–pose a puzzle for compositional semantics. If declarative clauses denote propositions and interrogative clauses denote questions, it is difficult to explain how ResPs may select both types of clauses. Prior accounts diverge on how to best rectify this inconsistency, from reducing interrogatives to propositions (Karttunen 1977, Ginsburg 1995, Spector & Egré 2015, a.o.), to reducing declaratives to questions (Uegaki 2016) or dispensing altogether with the assumption that the denotations of declaratives and interrogatives are of different types, as in Inquisitive Semantics (e.g. Theiler et al 2016).

In this thesis I bring novel data from Estonian to bear on this theoretical debate. In Estonian, a class of ResPs whose denotations concern contemplation, such as mõtlema ’think, consider’, convey what radically different meanings depending on the type of

complement it takes: When paired with a declarative complement, mõtlema canonically indicates representational belief like English think, but with an interrogative complement, it indicates ignorance toward the true answer to the embedded question, like English wonder.

I demonstrate that a proposition-embedding denotation for mõtlema is not compatible with its full range of meanings. Instead, I propose a question-embedding semantics for motlema, which relates an individual to the set of issues they are contemplating. I show how this denotation, combined with standard Gricean reasoning, can naturally derive the superficially distinct interpretations of mõtlema across contexts. Building upon the analysis by Uegaki (2016), I argue that a proposition-embedding semantics for ResPs is not sufficient to capture the Estonian facts, whereas a question-embedding semantics is. Furthermore, I suggest that this approach is also compatible with the uniform treatment of declaratives and interrogatives of Inquisitive Semantics.