Towards a typology of echo questions

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Abstract

Over the past half century, the analysis of questions has played an important role in the development of the syntactic theory. Despite this, echo questions have been given quite little attention, and most studies on echo questions focused on data from a single language. In this paper, I review strategies of forming echo questions of different types in 32 languages from five macroareas. For this purpose, I used a series of descriptive grammars based on Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire designed by Comrie and Smith (1977). I consider an echo question an instance of reported speech but with interrogative illocutionary force and define a derivation strategy as a set of features by which the echo question differs from the stimulus sentence. Each strategy is a combination of the following parameters: 1) the marking of the sentence part that signals quotation (M-part); 2) the marking of an interrogative semantic component; 3) the presence or absence of the pronominal deictic shift. An M-part can be a clause, while the part with the reported content (R-part) can be formally dependent or independent from it. An M-part can also be an affix, clitic, particle or remain unexpressed. An interrogative semantic component is usually expressed by intonation, an interrogative affix, clitic, particle, or pronoun. Among the languages of my sample, the most frequent strategies of forming echo questions are those in which the M-part is not expressed.

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About the authors

Tatyana V. Simonova

HSE University

Author for correspondence.
Email: 62tatyana@mail.ru
Russian Federation, Moscow

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