Antonina Jamrozik
University of Warsaw, Faculty of Philosophy
Inquisitive Semantics (cf. Ciardelli et al. 2018) is a powerful formal aparatus, designed mainy to formalise the idea that a conversation is not simply an exchange of information, but rather a game of raising and resolving issues. Most of the implementations are rather straightforward — questions are used to raise issues, and hence are inquisitive, and assertions are used to reslove issues, hence are informative. Moreover, as Groenendijk (2007) emphasises, the notion of questions and assertion has nothing to do with illocutionary force of a speech act, as it is purely a semantic concept.
In my talk, I propose to go against Groenendijk’s claim and show how the notion of inquisitive content can be applied to other phenomena in natural language, specifically — ambiguity. The idea that not only questions can be said to have inquisitive content is not novel, as in some implenetations of Inquisitive Semantics disjunctions can also be treated as inquisitive (eg. Groendijk 2007). In my talk I will show that there are striking formal similarities between ambiguous constructions and questions, which suggests that they could be formally represented in a similar way.
The issue that emerges, and that has led some theorists to abandon treating disjunctions as inquisitive too, is how to then differentiate between questions and ambiguity (or questions and disjunctions), as they are different parts of language that serve different purposes. Here is where I propose to put pragmatics back into semantics, and use Perry’s (2001) multipropositionalism and Frege’s (1918) idea of a force of an utterance in order to allow for the differentiation between questions and ambiguity, while maintaining the claim that they are structurally simmilar.
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SOPhiA 2026 