Content Nouns and the Semantics of Question-Embedding

In (1), it is shown that believe can, but know cannot, license the entailment from x Vs the rumor that p to x Vs that p (Vendler 1972, Ginzburg 1995). As I will argue in detail below, in the standard assumption that know has a proposition-taking denotation, an additional stipulation will be needed to block whatever the mechanism that licenses the entailment of believe in the case of know. In this paper, I propose an analysis of this contrast by arguing that predicates embedding either a declarative or an interrogative, such as know, never take a proposition, but only take a proposition-set (e.g., a question-denotation) as a semantic argument. The fact that they can embed a declarative is accounted for by the role of the declarative complementizer that turns a proposition into a singleton question. The resulting view of question/proposition-embedding captures the fact that exclusively interrogative-embedding verbs, such as ask and wonder, form a semantically natural class while avoiding the problematic prediction of the standard question-to-proposition reduction (e.g., Karttunen 1977, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984) that any declarative-embedding verb should be able to embed an interrogative unless further stipulations.