ABSTRACT
One crucial fact about interrogatives is that they resemble imperatives in the sense that both are semantically a special kind of request (1). Howevert while imperatives may involve some extralinguistic behaviour or action t questions are in most cases limited to linguistic responses. Therefore, we may assign the semantic interpretations 2 and 4 to the imperative sentences 1 and 3 respectively:
1-?ifta~i nna: fidah (open the window)
2-?atlubu ?Iaika ?an tafta~a nna: fidah (request I to you to open the window (I request that you open the window)
3-hal satadhabu ?Ia: bairu: t will go you to Beirut? (Are you going to Beirut?)
4-?a~lubu ?alaika ?an tuji:ba "X sa?adhabu ?ila: bairu:t" request I you answer "X I will/will not go to Beirut"
The actual realization of "X" in 4 should be a member of a class of sentence adverbials that include nacam or la: (yes and no respectively). This, as we shall see later in this chapter, is due to the presence of the interrogative morph hal (2).
