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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 213–238

Chapter 10
Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts

| Université Paris Diderot and University of Colorado

This chapter offers an analysis of two types of interrogatives used as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts in English – unresolvable questions and rhetorical questions. The function of these questions is not to request information that is unknown to the speaker. It is argued that surprise-induced unresolvable questions are expressive speech acts devoid of epistemic goals. Surprise-induced rhetorical questions are shown not to suggest an obvious answer, but to request a commitment update from the addressee. Adopting a schema-theoretic approach to surprise, it is shown that unresolvable questions and rhetorical questions can express mirativity, the former at the initial stage of the cognitive processing of unexpectedness, the latter at the last stage.

Keywords: rhetorical questions, conjectural questions, unresolvable questions, commitment, mirativity, surprise, expressivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The data
  • 3.Unresolvable questions
  • 4.Surprise-induced rhetorical questions
    • 4.1Expectation violation
    • 4.2 Informative answers
    • 4.3 The surprise-induced rhetorical scenario
    • 4.4 Addressee commitment
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpus data
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.10cel
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