Search Results

In chapter 7 ‘Biased questions, intonation, and discourse’, Brian Reese and Nicholas Asher explore how the intonation contributes to what is said through an examination of a particular sentence type, focusing on interrogative constructions that give rise to biased questions.  The authors examine three kinds of interrogative construction, tag questions, negative polar questions and what they call ‘emphatic focus questions’.  After a critical review of past approaches, it is argued that prosody and information from the syntax/semantics interface combine in these constructions to produce complex speech acts consisting of both an assertion and a question.   It is also argued that the study of such interrogative forms sheds light on the complex interaction between prosodic and lexical and compositional semantic information.

This chapter discusses the connection between question formation and focus strategies. Two versions of focus semantics for questions are considered. One seeks to explain the variable quantificational force of indeterminate pronouns in Japanese and German. The other seeks to explain intervention effects (the generalization that focus-sensitive expressions cannot occur above wh in-situ). Alternative explanations are also considered. Syntax is shown to mediate between the semantics of focus and prosody, as well as those aspects of prosody that have an impact on focus in questions. The relationship between information structure-based distinctions (topic–comment, focus–background, given–new) and focus semantics in terms of alternatives is articulated. Grammatical and pragmatic differences between polar questions and polar alternative questions are probed, as is the ambiguity of questions with disjunction. The role of prosody in separating out polar questions and alternative question readings of disjunctive questions and the proper analysis of alternative questions are discussed.

This chapter investigates issues specific to indirect questions. They are separated from morpho-syntactically similar free clauses and exclamatives, as well as from noun phrases with question-like interpretations, namely concealed questions. The theory of complement selection, c-selection and s-selection, is probed to determine whether the effects of s-selection at least can be derived from independently needed aspects of grammar. Embeddability of polar vs. constituent questions, and the possibility of inversion under rogative and responsive predicates are probed. Concealed questions require a mapping from noun phrases to question semantics. There are restrictions on the nature of the head noun and on the range of meanings that make this task challenging. Quantificational variability effects are also studied. Responsive predicates typically support this phenomenon but rogative predicates have been argued to do so under specific conditions. The various analyses proposed have different implications for the relationship between the embedded question and the embedding predicate.

This final chapter deals with non-canonical questions, questions that elicit information but also have at least one of the following properties: (i) they convey a bias on the part of the speaker about possible answers; (ii) their syntactic form does not conform to that of normal interrogatives; (iii) their purpose is something other than or in addition to eliciting information. Negative polar questions, declarative questions, echo questions, rhetorical questions, ability/inclination questions, and tag questions are among the constructions studied. The analyses of such questions build on analyses of canonical questions, in combination with appropriate tools for studying conversational dynamics. Although non-canonical questions are a diverse set, they behave alike in two ways. They tend to resist embedding and may be classified as root phenomena. They represent a conscious choice on the part of the speaker over a simpler alternative form available in the language.

Intonation in African languages remains an especially understudied topic of investigation. Chichewa is, then, rather exceptional, as there exist both purely impressionistic studies of intonation for the language, such as Kanerva (1990), as well as more phonetically informed studies, such as Carleton (1996), Myers (1996, 1999a, b), Downing (2011a, 2017), and Downing et al. (2004). Based on this work as well as our own investigations, the first three sections of the chapter provide an overview of intonation in three basic constructions: declarative sentences (both simple and complex), content questions and answers, and polar questions. Emphasis prosody (as opposed to focus prosody) is also discussed. Intonational phenomena covered include: downstep, final lowering, continuation rise, emphasis raising, suspension of downstep, and polar question intonation. The implications of Chichewa intonation for the typology of intonation in tone languages is discussed in the concluding section of the chapter.

This chapter examines the comparability of action across languages. There are grammatical forms that receive the same label in English and in Polish, such as imperative or polar question. But this does not mean that these are identical forms, or that they enter into social action in the same way. A close examination of the particular actions that are accomplished by drawing, among other resources, on particular grammatical forms such as imperatives or interrogatives, provides a more stable basis for comparison than do decontextualized grammatical categories (such as imperative) or broadly conceived action types (such as REQUEST). This chapter discusses two REQUEST actions, imperative nudges and interrogative requests, and finds that they are a part of both English and Polish family life. These actions are adapted to the same home environments, they are built through similar practices of talking, and they project the same responsive orientations.