TY - JOUR AU - Kiss, Angelika AU - Lo, Roger Yu-Hsiang PY - 2021/09/16 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Rhetorical wh-questions differing in inquisitiveness: Support from Mandarin prosody JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 25 IS - 0 SE - Articles DO - 10.18148/sub/2021.v25i0.949 UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/949 SP - 480-496 AB - <p>Rhetorical questions are in many respects both question-like and assertion-like, and have been analyzed either as questions or assertions. Building on Farkas and Roelofsen (2017), we propose a unified account of rhetorical and information-seeking wh-questions in inquisitive semantics, where we are no longer forced to choose between these labels. Rhetorical questions that suggest that the answer is the empty set (‘nobody’ to a question with who) are compared to ones that suggest a non-empty set as their answer. We assign the same basic conventional discourse effects to the two types of rhetorical questions as for information-seeking questions, but posit different special discourse effects, which signal differences in speaker commitment. Special effects are signaled by a marked form, such as by a non-canonical intonation. We argue that the prosodic marking of Mandarin wh-interrogatives, whether used as a genuine or rhetorical question, is consistent with our analysis.</p> ER -