In this talk I argue that the difference in interpretation between
disjunctive polar questions (PolQs), alternative questions (AltQs) and open
disjunctive questions (OpenQs) can be derived via effects of focus marking.
This proposal brings out the striking parallel between the prosody of
questions with contrastive topics and that of OpenQs and AltQs, and, unlike
previous approaches, does not rely on structural differences between
AltQs/OpenQs and PolQs. To show how this works out, an account of focus and
contrastive topic marking in questions is put forward in which f-marking in
questions determines what constitutes a possible answer by signaling what
the speaker’s QUD is like. By imposing a congruence condition between
f-marked questions and their answers that says that answers not only have
to resolve the question, but also the signaled QUD, we predict the right
answerhood conditions for AltQs, OpenQs and PolQs.
