Monotonicity and Interrogation * Ivan A Derzhanski Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science Bulgarian Academy of Sciences In this paper I explore a class of semantic restrictions on the formation of direct yes/no questions in Bulgarian, relating them to the monotonicity of the constituents of the main clause. The intuition is that the entire clause can be questioned if and only if its nominal and adverbial constituents, in so far as they can be interpreted as elements of antonym pairs of the ‘more : less’ type, are monotone increasing quantifiers. This is correlated with some other characteristic manifestations of the asymmetry of such pairs. I discuss the justification of this hypothesis and its implications for the meaning of interrogation. I also examine a selection of special cases where interrogation is inhibited by constituents which can’t be straightforwardly interpreted in such a way, as well as apparent exceptions to the main observation. 1 Introduction In Modern Bulgarian direct yes/no questions are formed by the interrogative enclitic li, whose host is the constituent located in the scope of the interrogation. When the question refers to the entire clause, the host of li is the verb itself. 1 Here are some examples: 2 * This research was initiated while I was a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, and was partly supported by contract I-526 with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Bulgaria. I am indebted to Tomi Marin for his Finnish judgements and to Meri Lakova, Elisabet Engdahl, Anastasia Giannakidou and Jason Merchant for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 If the verb form is a compound one or the clause is negative, li may (or may have to) cliticise onto an auxiliary verb or a short form of a personal pronoun, being immediately followed by the rest of the verbal complex, according to syntactic rules upon which I shall not dwell here, and whose operation does not affect the semantics. 2 In the translations the English counterpart of the host of the interrogative clitic in the Bulgarian sentences (or the auxiliary verb if there is one) shall be marked by underlining.