Self-Addressed Questions

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Regine Eckardt
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240796339

The project investigates questions that the speaker utters without requesting an answer. Many languages provide special cues to mark such questions and the case of study in Phase 1 were verb-end questions in German (Wann wohl der Zug kommt? ‘When does the train arrive I wonder?’). We were able to identify wohl as the central semantic player in such questions. German wohl patterns with evidential markers described for other languages. Evidentials were moreover discovered to be a typologically frequent cue in self-addressed questions, and in the next phase we want to gain a better understanding of this universal. We aim to generalize the analysis for German and develop a general semantics and syntax-semantic interface for self-addressed questions marked with evidentials, thus defining the core semantic/pragmatic component of this question type. A second area of study will be honorifics in self-addressed questions. Honorifics are important because they evidence how the second person addresse ‘you’ is integrated in the grammar of self-addressed questions. It was observed for Korean that self-addressed questions prohibit honorific marking. Our project substantially extended the data basis and proposed a formal account that spells out the folk wisdom “you don’t address yourself as socially superior” based on Kaplan’s notion of context. In the coming project phase we will extend our study to Japanese which offers a more complex – but also more revealing – interaction of honorifics, context and pronouns. We plan to assess relevant data in semantic field work and integrate these in a semantic account for self-addressed questions and honorification in Japanese.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces (QI)