ABSTRACT
Interrogatives present a wide range of challenges to syntacticians and semanticists. This chapter argues that adopting an I-language perspective focuses attention on certain theoretical questions and raises others. David Chomsky distinguished I-languages from E-languages, stressing the difference between expression-generating procedures and sets of generable expressions. Within traditional phase-based systems of the sort developed in Chomsky, the notion of an edge plays an important role. The left peripheral edge in interrogatives makes it possible to modify a sub-sentential concept such that this concept can be used for querying. The chapter also argues I-languages generate semantic instructions (SEMs) for how to assemble concepts and prepare them for various uses. In particular, an interrogative SEM can be used to build a T-concept and prepare it for use in querying—perhaps with an intervening step of abstracting on some variable in the T-concept, as with relative clauses.
