Embedded Interrogatives and Selection of Sentenial Complements in the Lexicon

Abstract

Combination properties of predicates and their complements have been long-standing issues for a theory of selection and/or subcategorization. This paper deals with verbs taking sentential complements, especially those occurring with embedded questions, and discusses what syntactic/semantic characteristics need to be specified in the lexicon to explain selectional properties of those verbs. Depending on the classes of embedding verbs, interrogatives are interpreted as either genuine questions or (resolving) answers to questions, which Sun~er(1993) accounts for by [±Qu] distinction of embedded questions, indicated in the subcategorization frames of verbs. This paper points out problems with Sun~er's proposal, and provides lexical entries of verbs in which such distinction is manifested by two different verb relations, resolutive and non-resolutive. With the MARKING feature in HPSG, the proposed analysis also accounts for the distribution of the complementizer que in Spanish, which remains problemantic in Sun~er. Further inverstigation of English and Korean data shows that complementizer selection needs to be specified lexically in these languages as well, by the account based on the MARKING feature and feature underspecification.