The Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, November 09, 4:00pm in Oak Hall 112, will feature Donka Farkas, semanticist from UC Santa Cruz.

Non-intrusive Questions

This talk is part of a larger project whose aims are to understand the difference between canonical and non-canonical questions, and to draw a typology of the latter. The first part of the talk sets up a series of pragmatic assumptions present in canonical questions, assumptions that follow from the semantics and conventional discourse effects of canonical interrogatives. The second part presents a particular type of non-canonical questions, called non-intrusive. Non-intrusive questions signal the absence of one of the pragmatic assumptions associated with canonical questions, namely the assumption of Addressee Compliance, i.e, they signal that the Speaker does not assume that the Addressee will settle the issue in the next move. The case study discussed in detail is that of a special interrogative form in Romanian, namely an interrogative marked by the morpheme oare. In the account to be worked out in the talk, the role of this morpheme is to mark a special conventional discourse effect that affects the projected Addressee responses.

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