Fine-grained yet flat: on the usefulness of dynamic representations for questions

Roelofsen and Dotlačil’s contribution illustrates the general applicability of dynamic approaches to question semantics, including when it comes to accounting for composition, as well as its potential for covering new empirical ground. In this note, I would like to emphasize one particular aspect of the idea which underlies much of the empirical parts of Roelofsen and Dotlačil’s argumentation, namely, the issue of how fine-grained question representations should be, which we can call the granularity of our theory of questions. As Roelofsen and Dotlačil briefly mention in their conclusion, their theory is highly granular, in a way that I will make clear below. I will argue that this property of dynamic approaches to questions opens a lot of analytical possibilities, and illustrate this by taking the example of how to analyse short answers.