Where question, conditionals and topics converge

Abstract

One puzzling fact about German is that yes-no questions that surface as verb-first structures can be interpreted as conditionals in a topic position. We provide an analysis using the basic idea of inquisitive semantics that questions and assertions can be treated on a par as denoting sets of possibilities. The key assumption is that in topic position, questions can be interpreted as conditionals if and only if they contain exactly one highlighted alternative possibility. The analysis correctly predicts the distribution of wh-questions and the distribution of so called irrelevance-conditionals containing auch ('too') as well. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.