Contrastive-Focus and Interpretations of a Wh-Phrase Scope

This paper aims to examine the logical and semantic meanings of wh-movement in English, by taking up individual and pair-list readings available in a sentence in which a quantifier like everyone is contained. Not following the movement hypotheses, I instead take the argument by Rooth (1992, 1996) and Ramchand (1996). I assume that a wh-phrase is contrastive-focused and a contrastive-focused phrase provides a set of relevant things, which contains the meaning of wh-questions. I claim that to derive a correct meaning related to the scope of wh-phrases, wh-movement is not necessarily required. This paper also considers the syntactic-semantic derivations of wh-questions in English, to find out an alternative method of the interpretations of wh-phrases.