Non-Canonical Questions
Oct 2023 · Oxford University Press
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320
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About this eBook
This book is the first to present a comprehensive theory of non-canonical questions, those question types that do not (only) request information from the addressee, but rather (additionally) tell us something about the speaker's epistemic and/or emotional state, such as can't-find-the-value questions, echo questions, rhetorical questions, and surprise questions. While much recent research has explored the formal semantics and the phonetics and phonology of both canonical and non-canonical questions, the literature is still lacking a comprehensive account from a syntax-pragmatics perspective that brings together the multiple findings and strands of research from the last twenty years. The standard view in the syntax-pragmatics literature is that most special interpretations of non-canonical questions involve syntactic projections at or even above the level of illocutionary force. In this work, Andreas Trotzke argues that this approach is a mistake, and proposes a new alternative theory of non-canonical questions in which both their special pragmatics and their syntax, as well as in many cases their emotive component, can be derived solely from propositional-level operators that do not affect the illocutionary level of utterances and can be found across illocutionary forces. This account dramatically simplifies the syntactic analysis of non-canonical questions and is also able to capture some previously unobserved data in the discourse behavior of those question types.
About the author
Andreas Trotzke is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz. His areas of expertise include syntax, pragmatics, and language education. He has been awarded several Invited Professorships and Visiting Scholarships, among them a 1-year scholarship at Stanford University (2016-2017), the prestigious Chair 2017 Empirical Foundations of Linguistics at Université Sorbonne Paris Cité/CNRS, and an IDEX Professorship (1re classe) at the Université de Bordeaux. He is the co-editor, with Xavier Villalba, of Expressive Meanings Across Linguistic Levels and Frameworks (OUP, 2021).
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