Lewis points out that some grammatical (read: syntactical?) transformations of underlying semantic material may only be appropriate if the material is being put to a certain pragmatic use. So, for example, for him [[speak French! ]] = [[you speak French]], even though they don't have the same embedding behavior:
(ok) John knows that you speak French.
(#) John knows that speak French!
this is alright as long as a proposition is the semantic value of [[speak French!]] (which it is, for him.) The unembeddability of [[speak French!]] is explained, not in terms of its semantic value, but in terms of the fact that the proposition is subjected to a transformation
you shut the door --> shut the door
that is only appropriate if it is to be used to make a command.
The same thing can be said for questions and disjunctions, since, for Hamblin, sets of propositions are obviously used interrogatively.
[[which Stooge do you like]] = [[you like Larry or Moe or Curly]] =
{you like Larry, you like Moe, you like Curly}.
Does this mean that e.g. the question mark has a certain semantic value--or a certain metasemantic value? This is worth investigating!...
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NB I still have no inkling of a compositional account of Hamblin's account of questions that present only one propositional alternative, like
(1) You like coffee?
(2) Have you been to Paris?
...why? For Hamblin, [[(1)]] = {you like coffee, you don't like coffee}. But it's not clear how to get this from the semantic values of the constituents of (1). Still, we can differentiate (1) and (2) from
(1') You like or you don't like coffee.
(2') You have been to Paris or you haven't been to Paris.
...in the way glossed above: they do not differ in semantic value, but in assertoric force.
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