Questions in Discourse : Semantics

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.

Klaus von Heusinger, Dr. phil. (1992) and Habilitation (1999) at University of Konstanz, Germany, is Professor in General and German Linguistics at the University of Cologne. He works and publishes in theoretical and comparative linguistics with a focus on referential categories, such as (in)definiteness, specificity, and partitivity, and on Differential Object Marking in Romance and Altaic languages.
Malte Zimmermann received his doctoral degree in Linguistics from the Universiteit van Amsterdam (2002) and is Professor for Semantics and Grammar Theory at Universität Potsdam. He works and publishes in theoretical and experimental linguistics with a focus on the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. His empirical focus is on Germanic and West African languages (Kwa, Chadic).
Edgar Onea received his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (2005). He has worked at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Göttingen. Currently, he is a professor for German Linguistics at the University of Graz. He has published on various topics in formal and experimental pragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, information structure and discourse structure.