What is it to ask a question? A formal pragmatic investigation of the sentential force of interrogatives.

• Applicant: Dr. Sven Lauer
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313646848

Interrogative sentences can be used to do many things. They can be used to request information, but also to test knowledge (as in exam questions), to teach (as in Socratic questions), to prompt for a public commitment (as in a debate in parliament), to bring up an issue for extended discussion, or even to make a statement (as in rhetorical questions). This heterogeneous class of uses arises from the interaction of four factors: (i) the denotational content of interrogatives, (ii) the grammatically-determined effect interrogatives have on the context (their "sentential force"), (iii) properties of the context of use and (iv) Gricean inferences. While the denotational content has long been fruitfully studied in formal semantics, and the last decade has seen great advances in the development of formal models of context and Gricean reasoning, there is as yet no comprehensive formal theory of the sentential force of interrogative sentences. Existing proposals generally focus on the stereotypical use of interrogatives as requests for information, neglecting many of their other uses. This situation contrasts with the state of the art with respect to the other major sentence types, declaratives and imperatives. The main objective of the proposed project is to draw on these advances in the study of imperatives to develop a formal characterization of the sentential force of interrogative sentences, embedded in a formal system that jointly models sentential forces and Gricean reasoning, so as to demonstrate how the various uses arise on the basis of the hypothesized dynamic effect. In the course of the project, special attention shall be given to two additional issues. First, rhetorical uses of questions come in two types: those asked with formally unmarked interrogatives and those that contain various kinds of morpho-syntactic devices that force a rhetorical construal. These two types will be compared and contrasted, and fit into the overall theory. Secondly, a particular kind of non-standard interrogative shall be investigated: Infinitival interrogatives like "where to go?" have a very particular, restricted range of uses as self-addressed, deliberative questions. These shall be investigated by comparing them to their canonical counterparts ("where do/can/should I go?"), which have the normal range of uses, despite sharing a number of curious properties with their infinitival counterparts.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups