Concealed Questions from a Cross-linguistic Perspective

The paper draws on empirical data of concealed questions from Banda Acehnese and revives the proposal that CQs are questions in disguise, contra many recent analyses. To show that the proposal works for English CQs, we examine five prominent empirical patterns with them: identity interpretation, Heim’s Ambiguity, quantified and indefinite CQs, coordination, and Greenberg’s Contrast. They do not pose any real challenge to the question-in-disguise analysis. Towards the end of the paper we discuss a couple of remaining issues.