Similar to the distinction between AltQs and PolQs, we observe a difference between the following two sentences.
(39) a. John wonders whether it’s raining or snowing. XPolQ,XAltQ,XWS b. John wonders whether it’s raining or whether it’s snowing. XAltQ,XWS The crucial observation here is that the sentence in (39a) has three possible readings, while the sentence in (39b) only has two. Not all of these readings are immediately obvious, so I will quickly go over them below.
Under one reading of (39a), John considers both the possibility that it is either raining or snowing and the possibility that it is neither, and he wonders which of the two is the case. This means that John’s state of mind is that of a disjunctive PolQ under this particular interpretation—that is, John is entertaining the issuewhether or not it is raining or snowing.
Under the second reading of (39a), John is wondering which of the following two is true: it is raining, or it is snowing. This means that John is entertaining the issue which corresponds to a closed AltQ.
The third reading is the wide scope disjunction reading (indicated as WS above), in which the speaker expresses uncertainty about the issue John is wondering about. Un- der this reading, eachwhether-clause is embedded under their ownwonderpredicate, which is elided in the second disjunct. Each embedded question corresponds to a PolQ in this case.
Intonation helps in distinguishing between these readings, but seems a much weaker cue than at the matrix level. The second AltQ reading might be the stronger one if the disjunction is pronounced with contrastive pitch accents—just as in an AltQ at the matrix level, but pronouncing the disjunction with a flat, block intonation does not unambiguously turn the embedded question into a PolQ. Similarly, the third WS read- ing might be the stronger one if the disjunction is pronounced with a pause after the first disjunct, indicating that parts of the second disjunct are elided, although an AltQ reading would not be ruled out under such a pronunciation.
Crucially, for (39b) only the closed AltQ and the WS reading are available. This therefore parallels the root case, where a PolQ reading is generally not available if the disjuncts are full clauses. Like in a PolQ at the root level, we need a question operator under the PolQ reading of (39a). Since (39a) may also be read as a closed AltQ, but, crucially, never as an open one, we again need the question operator to be absent under the second AltQ reading of (39a).
Again, in comparing embedded disjunctive questions with embedded conjunctive ones, we observe that conjunctive questions behave as the conjunction of PolQs, while disjunctive questions cannot be analyzed as disjunctions of PolQs. That is, in (40), John
wants to find out what the answer is to the polar questionis it raining in Amsterdam
and he wants to know the answer to the polar questionis it raining in Rotterdam. (40) John wonders whether it is raining in Amsterdam and whether it is raining in
Rotterdam.
We thus see that embedded questions pattern with root questions that are marked with a final fall in the sense that we need a question operator in PolQs and conjunctions of PolQs, but not in AltQs.
A possible way of deriving this difference is to assume a different PolQ and AltQ operator, but in both the matrix and the embedded case, there does not seem to be any morphosyntactic difference between the two at all. In fact, cases like (39b) where each disjunct contains a whetherclause might provide evidence against such an approach. That is, for embedded interrogatives it is often assumed that it is the interrogative com- plementizer whetheritself, that is responsible for the question semantics (cf. Larson, 1985; Han & Romero, 2004a; Rawlins, 2008b). Given the different questions above,
whethershould then be ambiguous between the PolQ operator, an AltQ operator and an operator that is completely vacuous. If this is the case, bi-clausal embedded AltQs with twowhether’s should be interpreted as having two such operators, but these ques- tions are neither interpreted as a disjunctions of PolQs, nor as a disjunction of AltQs. The problem with such an approach is therefore not only that we do not know how to determine which operator whetheractually corresponds to, but also that a bi-clausal embedded AltQs really should only have one question operator, not two.
Now, examples such as (39b) are often done away as either being ill-formed or as different constructions than embedded AltQs with a singlewhether. However, they do seem to have the exact same meaning and they are very commonly used—especially when the disjuncts are slightly longer. For the reader who is not yet convinced, here are some examples from the ‘wild’ which all just have a basic AltQ reading:
(41) It can then offer a suggestion to staff aboutwhetherto keep in custody a few more hours,whetherto release them on bail before a charge, orwhetherto remand them in custody.6
(42) The new chairman must now decide [...] whether to appeal to those who want war orwhetherto ignore them and forge ahead with his own road for this troubled club.7
(43) Whetherthat interpretation turns out to be correct, orwhetherMr. Gandhi’s swift installation as Prime Minister will exercise a stabilizing influence, is not 6https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/police-are-testing-an-ai-that-can-recommend-whether-a-
suspect-should-be-held-or-notuk591427e8e4b00b643ebb54b4
7https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/sport/football/dundee-united/610967/jim-spence-new-dundee-
clear.8
(44) At issue iswhetherthe payment the men are discussing was campaign-related and intended to influence the election [...], orwhetherit was merely meant to shield the married Trump from an embarrassing revelation harmful to his personal life.9
Thus, whethercannot straightforwardly be equated to any kind of question operator, but if that is really the case then where does the question meaning come from in embedded questions? Again we seem to have a similar problem as we saw in the root case, since bi-clausal AltQs look like disjunctions of PolQs but are really not interpreted as such. so we can perhaps ask ourselves the following question:
Puzzle 4. Q in embedded questions: What is the semantic contribution of ‘whether’, and if not from this complementizer, where exactly does the question interpretation come from in embedded questions?