Uyghur (Turkic) has three complementation strategies each headed by a
distinct particle: dep, liq and ish. Clauses headed by dep have tense,
aspect, and agreement marking, clauses headed by liq only have aspect, and
clauses headed by ish only allow bare verbs. While rogative verbs (`ask',
`wonder') can take interrogative complements of all three clause types,
responsive verbs (`know', `agree') cannot take dep headed interrogative
complements. When taking a ish complement, rogative verbs acquire a modal
flavor; responsive verbs do not.
This paper follows the intuitions in Suñer (1993) and Lahiri (2002) that
responsive verbs take semi-question complements, while rogative verbs take
ontologically distinct full question complements. This paper differs by
arguing that complements of attitude verbs such as `know' contain arguments
for mental models, of type <s,<st,t>>, which associate a given world with a
set of propositions which the model attributes to that world. I argue that
semi-questions have open arguments for a single model and a single world,
while full questions have an additional world argument. When building a
clause, a REQUEST operator is attached to a semi-question, opening a world
argument and subsequently turns the complement into a full question.
Clauses headed by dep are syntactically large and include a REQUEST
operator, while clauses headed by liq are smaller and lack a REQUEST
operator. The REQUEST operator, can however apply after the introduction of
a complementizer such as liq. As a result, while full questions may be
represented by both dep and liq headed clauses, semi-questions can only be
represented by liq headed clauses, causing ungrammaticality. Clauses headed
by ish cannot include a REQUEST operator, and instead the interpretation is
derived from the insertion of a silent modal which allows the application
of a REQUEST operator, similar to infinitive embedding under `ask' in
English. I argue that the difference in judgement across rogative and
resultative verb complements in Uyghur is representative not just of
different syntactic size requirements of semi-questions and full questions,
but also that these differences may be distinguished by different
complementation strategies within a language.
