Conjectural questions: The case of German verb-final wohl questions

Abstract

The paper analyzes German verb-final questions with the particle wohl, which roughly translate as 'Q, I wonder?'. It construes German as an instance of a general typological pattern: Conjectural questions (CQs) are marked by evidentials in many languages, and German wohl is an inferential evidential. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, wohl is shown to pattern with inferential evidentials in other languages. Declarative wohl p asserts p and conveys 'the speaker defeasibly infers p from secure knowledge' as non-at-issue content. Second, the analysis is extended to standard wohl Q questions, accounting for the interrogative flip. Third, the analysis integrates conjectural verb-final wohl questions. I propose that CQs ask for answers that are defeasibly entailed by the pooled knowledge of speaker and addressee. Due to the logic of defeasible inference, the addressee is not in a position to answer the CQ unless both interlocutors have pooled their knowledge. In normal utterance contexts, these questions are thus un-answerable. We see two conventionalized reactions: the interlocutors engage in speculative discourse, or the CQ is understood as a statement of curiosity that doesn't require a response.

Self-addressed questions and honorifications: The case of Japanese daroo-ka/desyoo-ka

“…plain-form questions vs. daroo-ka questions. In each context, an emergency happens and the speaker in the context asks the addressee a question 11 The point also matches the idea proposed by Eckardt (2020) that the pragmatic profile of SAQs allows joint speculations of the speaker and addressee.…”

“…et al 2010, calling them conjectural questions), German questions with verb-final structure and the discourse particle wohl (Truckenbrodt 2006;Zimmermann 2008Zimmermann , 2013Eckardt 2020), the Korean question particle -na (Eckardt & Disselkamp 2019), Japanese daroo-questions (Hara 2019), and more. Therefore, the present paper, following previous Japanese SAQ studies (Hara 2006(Hara , 2018(Hara , 2019Oguro 2017;Yokoyama 2013), investigates how Japanese SAQs interact with honorifications and the second person (bystander) in the context.…”

Assessing alternatives: the case of the presumptive future in Italian

“…The last issue we mention and leave open is the question of how PF compares with modal particles such as wohl in German or darou in Japanese, which have similar though not identical effects. (See Eckardt (2020) and references therein for wohl, and Uegaki and Roelofsen (2018) and references therein for darou.) Common to all these forms is that they are used as means of nuancing commitment to the prejacent.…”