Non-Canonical Questions

Reviews / Votes

Adopting a syntactic approach, Andreas Trotzke provides a detailed account of all the main types of non-canonical questions - in situ questions, declarative questions, exclamatory questions - from a crosslinguistic perspective. Teasing apart emphasis and illocutionary force, he generalizes the role of emotional intensity and views emphatic word order as the expression of a propositional attitude that does not affect the illocutionary level. Interestingly, his demonstration encompasses the discourse effects of non-canonical questions, which are possibly used either as first moves or as second moves via pragmatic inferences. The book is a valuable addition to the literature on questions and non-canonicity, providing a wealth of information on indirect and mixed speech acts, and on the syntax-pragmatics interface. * Agnes Celle, Universite de Paris * This book offers a fresh, comprehensive, and crosslinguistically well-grounded analysis of non-canonical questions, providing an in-depth investigation of both the syntactic and the pragmatic factors involved; the author also sketches a new framework encompassing the defining properties of non-canonical questions at the syntax-pragmatics interface by exploring the role of emotional intensity and expressivity and their linguistic encoding. This work represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the grammatical representation of the pragmatic dimension of human language, with interesting implications for the theory of speech acts. * Nicola Munaro, Ca' Foscari University of Venice * The proposal in this monograph and many of the proposals for high left-peripheral speech act syntax proposals do complementary work. This, I feel, is one of the true contributions of the monograph-that it highlights different levels at which speaker perspective can be introduced in the syntax, an observation from which we can buildtypologies of how speaker perspective is expressed and also make predictions about how different aspects of speaker perspective interact with prosody, pragmatic interpretation and even gesture. Another clear strength of the work is its careful use of experimental work to supportclaims made about the use in context of different utterances to inform the line drawn between syntax and pragmatics, which feeds the proposal of clause-level expressive projections. * Rebecca Woods, English Language and Linguistics *