Structure and Derivation of the Concealed Question

Abstract

The present paper argues that the specificational sentence (SPC) and the concealed question (CQ) derive from what we call the Functional Noun Phrase (FuncNP) which has the specific structure in which the head FuncN denotes a relation between its two arguments, where the outer argument delimits the semantic domain (range) of FuncN R, and the inner argument exhaustively specifies the semantic domain of FuncN delimited by the outer argument. With the inner argument moved to SpecFocP, we obtain the SPC. The present paper derives the CQ in a way strikingly parallel with the derivation of the SPC: We posit Op as the inner argument of the FuncNP, which is moved to SpecCP. It is shown that the CQ ehibits the effect of the wh-island constraint both in English and Japanese. A syntactic analysis of the Englishman sentence is presented.