Distributive ignorance implications of inquisitive and epistemic attitudes∗

Inquisitive attitude verbs like wonder do not just imply that their subject does not know the answer to the embedded question, but a stronger form of ignorance, which has been called distributive ignorance (Roelofsen and Uegaki, 2016). Similarly, if an epistemic attitude verb like believe takes a disjunctive complement, it implies that its subject considers all disjuncts possible. We present two experiments examining the ignorance implications of wonder and believe, with different types of complements and different types of quantificational subjects. The results of these experiments suggest that the distributive ignorance implications triggered by the two verbs should be accounted for in a unified way. More specifically, we argue that the data are best explained by an account that involves a strengthening mechanism which is sensitive to the syntactic structure of the complement of the verbs involved and optionally applies locally, as part of the semantic composition process.