Non-Canonical Questions

Abstract

This book is the first to present a comprehensive theory of non-canonical questions. By ‘non-canonical’ questions, the book refers to 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 (e.g., so-called can’t-find-the-value questions, echo questions, rhetorical questions, surprise questions). The present monograph makes a distinctly new contribution to the field. While there has been a lot of recent research on the formal semantics and the phonetics and phonology of both canonical and non-canonical questions, our knowledge about non-canonical questions in the syntax–pragmatics literature still lacks a comprehensive account that brings together various observations and accounts that have been discussed since the beginning of the twenty-first century. 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. This monograph argues that this approach is a mistake, and proposes instead a new theory of non-canonical questions where 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 simplifies the syntactic analysis of non-canonical questions quite dramatically, and it is also able to capture some unnoticed data in the discourse behavior of those question types.