Suspense is an important aspect of cognitive-emotional narrative text comprehension. We adopt a text-centered, linguistic approach, investigating how the information structure of a narrative text as modeled by its erotetic structure instigates suspense. We report on two studies that reveal a strong correlation between the presence of what we term ‘potentially inquiry-terminating questions’ (PITQs) and the level of experienced suspense. PITQs are binary questions that hold a unique role in the erotetic structure of a narrative: the reader perceives one possible answer to resolve a broader, pivotal plot-related question and the other answer to leave it temporarily unresolved. While previous research has proposed that information structure is a factor in deriving narrative suspense, in this paper, we show that it is the role of PITQs specifically that allows us to effectively predict suspense. Our research shows that PITQs are a linguistic notion that has a clear cognitive-emotional correlate. Thus, PITQs should receive future attention in linguistic theory, pragmatics and interdisciplinary studies. While our approach is specifically concerned with written texts, the flexibility of erotetic theories of interpretation in principle allows us to extend the scope of the present approach to any other medium of narrative presentation.