Questions with high adverbial WH-phrases, cartography and the case of interrogatives with ‘como assim’ in BP

Abstract

This work deals with questions containing high adverbial wh-phrases, discussing the main cartographic analysis proposed for these sentences and the syntactic and interpretive properties of interrogatives with incredulity como assim in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Sentences with como assim can present four readings: a causal reading, a purpose reading, an elucidative reading and an incredulity reading. We assume that sentences with the incredulity reading involve an I-REQUEST operator (in terms of KRIFKA, 2012), since they do not act as a request of information from the speaker, but rather as a request of confirmation, from the hearer, of the content of his/her previous utterance. In these contexts, como assim conveys, as part of its pragmatics, an expression of the speaker's incredulity about the possibility of confirmation, from his interlocutor, of the assertion previously uttered. Incredulity como assim is a Speech Act, therefore cannot occur in embedded contexts. Furthermore, since como assim is externally merged in a high position, in Spec of IntP, it is insensitive to negation and cannot occur in situ.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2019.v15n3a28567