Book: Interrogative Investigations

[Tracy Holloway King]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the availability of:

INTERROGATIVE INVESTIGATIONS:THE FORM, MEANING AND USE OF ENGLISH
INTERROGATIVES; Jonathan Ginzburg (King's College) and Ivan A. Sag
(Stanford University); paper ISBN: 1-57586-278-6, $30.00, cloth ISBN:
1-57586-277-8, 461 pages. CSLI Publications 2001.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
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BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which
questions are expressed. Their analysis is of great interest to
linguists as well as to computer scientists, human-computer interface
designers, and philosophers. Interrogative constructions have played
a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory.
Nonetheless, most syntactic work to date has taken place quite
separately from formal semantic and pragmatic work on interrogatives.
Although there has by now been a significant amount of work on
interrogatives across a variety of languages, there exist few
syntactic and semantic treatments that provide a comprehensive
account of a wide range of interrogative constructions and uses in a
single language.
This book closes the gap in research on this subject. By developing
the frameworks of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Situation
Semantics, the authors provide an account that rigorously integrates
syntactic, semantic, and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The
challenge of providing exhaustive coverage of the interrogative
constructions of English, including various constructions that occur
solely in dialogue interaction, leads to new insights about a variety
of contentious theoretical issues. These include matters of semantic
ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic
effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical
theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar,
and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue. The account is
stated with sufficient rigor to enable reasonably direct
computational implementation.