Research Groups: Week of August 24-28

Friday, August 28, 11:00 AM-12:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) reporting on joint work with Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo (University of British Columbia): "Rhetorical wh-questions differing in inquisitiveness: Support from Mandarin prosody."

Rhetorical questions are in many respects both question-like and assertion-like. In this talk, we propose a unified account of rhetorical and information-seeking wh-questions in inquisitive semantics, by which we claim to account for both traits. Rhetorical questions that suggest that the answer is the empty set ('nobody' to a question with who) are compared to ones that suggest a non-empty answer. We assign the same basic conventional discourse effects to the two types of rhetorical questions as for information-seeking questions, but posit different special discourse effects (following Farkas and Roelofsen 2017), which signal differences in speaker commitment. Rhetorical questions with an empty set answer signal that the speaker commits to a single piece of information, which is an informative update. On the other hand, rhetorical questions with a non-empty answer do not signal a specific answer as straightforwardly, let alone the givenness of the answer. Their interpretation therefore depends on the context, unlike the interpretation of empty set rhetorical questions. While rhetorical questions are normally considered a homogeneous group, given the differences between the two subtypes posited above, it is expected to find differences in their prosodic realization as well. We briefly show the results of a production experiment on Mandarin rhetorical wh-questions, which shows a three-way prosodic distinction between information-seeking questions and the two types of rhetorical questions: we observe a gradience in a number of prosodic cues that we think matches the inquisitive state of the speaker.