Aspects of the Indefiniteness Effect

摘要

This paper proposes an account for the indefiniteness effect discussed in [1]. We shall argue that the effect arises from (a) the tendency of indefinites in certain interrogative constructions to take wide scope over WH-terms, resulting in 'quantifying into' questions, and (b) the pragmatic impropiety of interrogatives with wide scope taking indefinites to form speech acts for requesting answers. Our proposal is formally implemented using the interpretation of quantifying into questions as choice readings provided by [2] and [3].