Abstract
Besides information-seeking questions, there are all kinds of non-standard questions, whose function is not to request information from the addressee, but rather to convey information about the speaker’s epistemic or emotional state. These include rhetorical questions, surprise questions, incredulity questions, etc. This paper focuses on rhetorical questions (RQs), a sub-type of non-canonical questions, and presents the first production experiment which has investigated them in French to date. We compared string-identical rhetorical and information seeking questions (ISQs) in French. Experimental design and preliminary results are presented and discussed. In the final part of the paper, we discuss possible correlations between these findings and the semantic and pragmatic properties that distinguish RQs from ISQs.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Non-canonical questions from a comparative perspective: Introduction to the special collection
- A comparative corpus study on a case of non-canonical question
- Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other
- French questions alternating between a reason and a manner interpretation
- The pragmatics of surprise-disapproval questions: An empirical study
- Non-standard questions in English, German, and Japanese
- Timing of belief as a key to cross-linguistic variation in common ground management
- The prosody of French rhetorical questions
- Surprise questions in spoken French
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Non-canonical questions from a comparative perspective: Introduction to the special collection
- A comparative corpus study on a case of non-canonical question
- Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other
- French questions alternating between a reason and a manner interpretation
- The pragmatics of surprise-disapproval questions: An empirical study
- Non-standard questions in English, German, and Japanese
- Timing of belief as a key to cross-linguistic variation in common ground management
- The prosody of French rhetorical questions
- Surprise questions in spoken French