Abstract
The paper investigates the conditions under which German two-place verbs like wissen dass ‘know’ and bedauern dass ‘regret’ embed interrogatives. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for a dass-verb to have an ob-form. The corresponding verbs we call objective. An objective verb has a wh-form (F weiß, wer kommt ‘F knows who is coming’) if it satisfies a further condition stating that it has to be consistent with wissen dass. A non-objective dass-verb does not have an ob-form, but it can have a wh-form if it permits a da- or es-correlate and meets par ticular consistency conditions which render it factive or cognitive in the presence of the correlate (cf. bedauern ‘regret’ vs. annehmen ‘assume’) It turns out that the meaning of the wh-form of non-objective verbs deviates distinctly from the meaning of the wh-form of objective verbs. Unlike other approaches our rules are general and hold without exceptions.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful discussions with Dick de Jongh and Thomas E. Zimmermann as well as the comments of the anonymous reviewers.
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Schwabe, K., Fittler, R. (2009). Semantic Characterizations of German Question-Embedding Predicates. In: Bosch, P., Gabelaia, D., Lang, J. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5422. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00665-4_19
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