37. Jahrestagung der DGfS

AG 6: The prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages

Session organizers

Daniela Wochner, Nicole Dehé, Bettina Braun (U Konstanz) & Beste Kamali, Hubert Truckenbrodt (ZAS Berlin)

External website

Abstract

There has been a recent spur of research aiming to understand interrogatives from multiple perspectives including prosody, semantics, and pragmatics. In bringing together research on canonical and non-canonical questions, we aim to provide a forum where cutting edge theoretical approaches meet highly detailed empirical assessment.

For canonical questions, the workshop is particularly interested in the relation between questions and focus in the different modules of grammar, and in the role of the intonation contour in different questioning types. Where do questions show question-specific stress- or phrasing patterns? Where do wh-phrases show similarities to focused phrases? Why do the alternatives in alternative questions show focus prosody? Intervention effects are an important topic in the interaction between focus and wh-phrases and/or alternatives in alternative questions. Are there other interactions as well? What question-specific intonation contours or question-specific assignment of intonation contours do different languages show, and how is the variation to be understood?

The non-canonical questions that the workshop is interested in include those which (i) besides being used as requests for information, have further pragmatic dimensions; (ii) have non-interrogative syntax; and/or (iii) may be identified as non-canonical through their prosody, or any combination of these properties. Example types are declarative questions, tag questions, and rhetorical questions. We would like to see if various well-known –but not uncontroversial- properties of non-canonical questions stand up to closer scrutiny: Are declarative questions and tags always confirmation-seeking rather than information-seeking? Do declarative questions always have rising intonation and why? How to approach the illocutionary force of assertion in rhetorical questions and to what extent can their prosody inform us? How do modal particles such as schon in German contribute to the rhetorical question pragmatics?

This workshop is of interest to a broad audience working on syntax, semantics, prosody, and their interfaces, with a focus on interrogatives and related phenomena.

Program