"Surely that’s not a negative declarative question?" – Polar discourses in Swedish, German and English

Abstract

This paper discusses questions that are declarative in form, contain a negative marker, and express epistemic speaker bias. Fronting of the negative marker in Swedish is taken as a starting point for a delineation of this type of question, termed ‘rejecting question’, against the background of theories of declarative questions. The discussion is expanded with data from German and English. I propose that rejecting questions are a type of tentative assertion without direct reference to the addressee, and that these tentative assertions express FALSUM focus.