Concealed questions in Portuguese

Abstract

This paper studies the grammatical behaviour of concealed questions, structures that superficially coincide with noun phrases, but are equivalent to sentential indirect questions, expressing propositions rather than denoting common entities – e.g. (ninguém me perguntou) [_NP as pessoas que foram nomeadas] (lit. ‘(nobody asked me) the people that were nominated’). Normally, concealed questions can be paraphrased by equative interrogative clauses with qual – (ninguém me perguntou) [_F quais são as pessoas que foram nomeadas] (lit. ‘(nobody asked me) who the people that were nominated were’) – and it is plausible to analyse the former as derived from the latter by ellipsis. However, this is not always the case. After a brief survey of the literature on concealed questions in English, Portuguese and Spanish, I will summarise their main semantic and syntactic properties in Portuguese. It will be shown, on the one hand, that concealed questions form a heterogeneous class in Portuguese, containing subclasses with special properties, viz. those that are selected by predicates of surprise – e.g. (surpreendeu-me) [_NP as pessoas que foram nomeadas] (lit. ‘(it’s amazing) the people that were nominated’) –, which do not allow the paraphrase mentioned above. On the other hand, it will be shown that even the group of concealed questions that can be paraphrased by equative constructions exhibits variation in grammatical behaviour: some concealed questions display standard sentential properties, others standard nominal properties, others still oscillate between sentential-like and nominal-like behaviours.