Functions of Language - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2022

This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French and Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic analysis relying on two parameters, propositional activation and pragmatic functions, reveals that the licensing conditions and the use of this structure largely differ in the two languages. While French wh-in situ do not require an activated proposition and can introduce a discourse-new topic, Italian wh-in situ mostly require an activated proposition and, at least in the analyzed corpus data, do not introduce discourse-new topics. An examination of the context also reveals that the different licensing conditions influence the interactional uses of these questions. All in all, both French and Italian wh-in situ require a pragmatic condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or at least inferable, information in the linguistic context (as is typical of Italian) or to predictable situations in the extralinguistic context (such as expected discourse moves in social interactions, as is the case for French).

This paper deals with autonomous uses of German subordinate wh-interrogatives as headlines, so-called wh-headlines (e.g. Was Kinder brauchen, ‘What children need’), which we approach from a discourse-pragmatic and diachronic perspective. We take our starting point in the QUD-based, discourse-pragmatic model of interrogatives as proposed by Rosemeyer (this issue). Applying this model, first, to the case of wh-headlines in present-day news discourse, we develop the hypothesis that a writer in using a wh-headline may explicitly introduce an implicit QUD into discourse without posing it as an information-seeking question. In a second step, we assess this hypothesis with respect to the use of wh-headlines in various genres from the Middle High German and Early New High German periods, for which we provide three in-depth case studies. The case studies are contextualized against the backdrop of reflections on potential impact factors in the diachronic evolvement of this particular writing practice. Overall, the results of our study can be taken to lend support to our hypothesis also for genres other than news discourse and for time periods other than modern German.

The paper critically examines some central principles of the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework and ultimately explores the concept of ‘question’, central to QUD-models. It demonstrates how fine-grained, interactionally informed analyses of language-specific categories can reveal building blocks of interaction and explain the sources of the observed information- and discourse-structuring interpretations (such as update, contrast and more). Employing data from Anal Naga (Trans-Himalayan, India), it proceeds to a fine-grained analysis of the notion of ‘question’. The decomposition of ‘questions’ into smaller building blocks similarly reveals how diverse categories and discourse processes can trigger the interpretation of an information request. These findings and additional theoretical arguments suggest that QUD-models are problematic for various reasons: such models are non-parsimonious as they add superfluous extra layers to explain the observations; the explanatory apparatus is circular, as the extra layers are derived from within the explananda but regarded as underlying explanatory factors; and the models gloss over the actual factors by channelling them into cover terms prematurely regarded as primitive. Finally, since ‘question’ does not constitute a primitive concept but is a product of diverse discourse processes, discourse cannot be modelled on this foundation.

It is well known that Spanish futurizing morphology is frequently used not to express futurity, but instead to formulate a hypothesis, i.e. express epistemic modality. Although this is possible with both synthetic or periphrastic future marking, the synthetic future tense is more likely to express an epistemic reading than the periphrastic future. This paper explores the relationship between futurizing morphology and sentence type on the basis of a quantitative analysis of about n = 2,700 tokens of synthetic and periphrastic ‘future’ constructions in spoken conversations from Madrid, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. On the basis of a bottom-up classification of these tokens regarding their potential to express modal meanings, we demonstrate that polar and partial futurizing interrogatives are more likely to display modal meanings and associated rhetorical effects than futurizing declaratives. This effect is even stronger for synthetic future constructions, due to a conventionalization of specific form-function pairings. Finally, we also document substantial dialectal variation in the use of futurizing morphology.