Introduction

In this chapter I will present my analysis, couched within the LHK theory, of a class of sentences which contain complement whclauses. This is in essence an attempt to carry out the program begun by Nishigauchi (1986; 1990), who analysed certain wh-constructions in terms of this theory, but did not develop an explicit semantics nor pursue the consequences of this approach. My general strategy in this chapter is to look for parallels in the quantificational behavior of whphrases and indefinite NPs.l As we saw in chapter I, one of the principal motivations for the LHK treatments of indefinites as logically open sentences is their ability to display quantificational variability; in section 2 of this chapter I will show that wh-phrases likewise can be associated with a variety of quantificational forces. I also provide the appropriate restricted quantification representation that accounts for this, in which the wh-clause itself serves to restrict the quantifier. In section 3 I adduce independent evidence for this semantic function of wh-clauses. In section 4 I propose a general derivation of the restrictive term, based on its containing presuppositions of the nuclear scope, which accounts for a certain asymmetry in the quantifiability of whphrases. In section 5 I discuss at length the pragmatic variability of many clause-embedding predicates with respect to complement-presupposition.