EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 15 FEBRUARY 2020
Unforeseen situations violate the speaker’s expectations and generate a conflict between her epistemic state and the new information at hand. Questions asked in reaction to those situations serve a responsive function - they question the reality status and the reliability of unexpected information. In other words, they activate modal and evidential reasoning. Although surprise is generally reported to be expressed through exclamatives (Rett and Murray 2013), in dialogue surprise reactions were found to be mostly conveyed by interrogatives in English, both in direct and indirect speech acts (Celle et al. 2019, Celle 2018). In French, recent studies have identified several constructions that conventionally express surprise, such as questions with a right dislocation (C’est quoi ce truc?) (Dekhissi 2018), qu’est-ce que-questions meaning ‘how come’ (qu’est ce que tu rigoles?) (Dekhissi 2016) and more generally questions that initiate an “attributional search” such as comment-questions with a reason reading (Comment Max peut-il lire le courrier de Paul?) (Fleury and Tovena 2018b; 2018a). These are not information-seeking questions, but a type of non-canonical questions. How these questions relate to rhetorical questions and to exclamatory questions remains to be explored. One of the goals of the workshop is to determine whether prosody can help distinguish between surprise questions, rhetorical questions and exclamation.
Previous studies have shown that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the questioning speech act and a rising intonation in English and French (Delais-Roussarie and Herment 2018). The intonational contour results from a combination of factors, among which speaker’s attitude. This attitude being influenced by the way the situation lives up to their expectations, surprise can be predicted to play a key role in the prosody of questions. Furthermore, Delais-Roussarie and Herment (2018) argue that in addition to the final intonational contour, other factors should be taken into account to describe prosody in specific speech acts, such as pitch accent placement and prenuclear contour. Recent experimental studies on German further suggest that information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions significantly differ with respect to prosody (Wochner et al. 2015). Interestingly, rhetorical questions exhibit characteristics that are typically associated with the expression of surprise, such as lengthening and a high proportion of L*+H nuclear accents (Malisz et al. 2018).
This workshop will be aimed at investigating the relationship between the prosodic and syntactic features of non-canonical questions, especially those expressing surprise in comparison with rhetorical questions and exclamation. We invite submissions addressing this question in French, English, German, Finno-Ugric languages as well as in other typologically different languages, but also more generally the interface between prosody and syntax in expressive and questioning speech acts.
This workshop is organized as part of the Programme Hubert Curien Parrot n°42231NG coordinated by Agnès Celle and Anu Treikelder (U. of Tartu) and Programme Hubert Curien Procope n°42412PC coordinated by Agnès Celle and Andreas Trotzke (U. of Konstanz) on surprise questions from a comparative perspective.
Selected references:
Celle, Agnès. 2018. ‘Questions as Indirect Speech Acts in Surprise Contexts’. In Tense, Aspect, Modality, Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic Perspectives, Ayoun, Dalila; Celle, Agnès; Lansari, Laure, 213–38. Studies in Language Companion Series 197. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Celle, Agnès, Anne Jugnet, Laure Lansari, and Tyler Peterson. 2019. ‘Interrogatives in Surprise Contexts in English’. In Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Linguistics, Depraz, Natalie; Celle, Agnès, 117–37. Consciousness and Emotion Series. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Dekhissi, Laurie. 2016. ‘Qu’est-Ce t’as Été Te Mêler de Ça ?! Une « nouvelle » Structure Pour Les Questions Rhétoriques Conflictuelles’. Journal of French Language Studies 26 (3): 279–98. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269515000253.
———. 2018. ‘L’expressivité En Questions’. In L’expression Des Sentiments. De l’analyse Linguistique Aux Applications, Raluca Nita, Freiderikos Valetopoulos, 215–26. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth, and Sophie Herment. 2018. ‘Intonation et interprétation des questions : un puzzle pluridimensionnel’. In L’interrogative en français, Marie-José Béguelin, Aidan Coveney, Alexander Guryev, 51–74. Bern ; New York: Peter Lang. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01425412.
Fleury, Damien, and Lucia Tovena. 2018a. ‘Reason Questions with “comment” Are Expressions of an Attributional Search’. Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. http://semdial.org/anthology/Z18-Fleury_semdial_0015.pdf.
Fleury, Damien, and Lucia M. Tovena. 2018b. ‘À Propos Des Lectures Des Questions En Comment’. Edited by F. Neveu, B. Harmegnies, L. Hriba, and S. Prévost. SHS Web of Conferences 46: 12003. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20184612003.
Malisz, Zofia, Erika Brandt, Bernd Möbius, Yoon Mi Oh, and Bistra Andreeva. 2018. ‘Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages’. Frontiers in Communication 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025.
Rett, Jessica, and Sarah Murray. 2013. ‘A Semantic Account of Mirative Evidentials’. In Proceedings of SALT, 23:453–472. http://elanguage.net/journals/salt/article/view/23.453/0.
Wochner, Daniela, Jana Schlegel, Nicole Dehé, and Bettina Braun. 2015. ‘The Prosodic Marking of Rhetorical Questions in German’. In , 987–91. https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/33220.
Abstract proposals: 2-page abstracts including references
30-minute presentations
Deadline for submission: January 15
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