S-P Interrogatives

Abstract

By an ‘S-P interrogative’ I mean an English interrogative something like one of the following four:

• (1) Which S is a P?

• (2) Which S’s are P’s?

• (3) What’s (an example of) an S which is a P?

• (4) What are some (examples of) S’s which are P’s? S-P’ is supposed to suggest ‘subject-predicate’, but since I use ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ in other ways, it will reduce confusion if I stick to just ‘S-P’. Let us call S the S-term and P the P-term of (1)–(4). I want to marshall three quite different apparatuses for your consideration as formal explications of S-P interrogatives, paying particular attention to the way in which S-terms and P-terms enter differently into the logic of the situation. Throughout, the primary aim will be to give an account of these questions in terms of their answers — ‘answers’ in the sense of ‘possible answers’ or ‘what counts as an answer’ rather than in the sense of ‘true answers’.

This research has been supported in part by the System Development Corporation, Santa Monica, California, and in part by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. GS-28478. I wish to thank Thomas Steel, with whom many of the key ideas were worked out. An early version was read in 1968 at the Oberlin Conference. I have profited from comments there given by L. Åqvist.