Embedded Rising Declaratives and Embedded Quotation

Abstract

Declarative sentences uttered with rising intonation are used to ask biased questions. Do they share a denotation with interrogatives, despite their declarative form? Or do they serve as requests for information despite sharing a denotation with other declaratives? This paper explores the behavior of rising declaratives embedded under rogative speech-act verbs, and shows them to be invariably quotative. As such, these observations might just as likely pose problems for the semantics of embedded quotation under rogative verbs as for the semantics of rising declaratives. This paper pursues the former path.