Programme: Discourse-pragmatic Perspectives on Interrogatives in Romance and Elsewhere

Programme: Discourse-pragmatic Perspectives on Interrogatives in Romance and Elsewhere

Date: 16-Jul-2019 – 16-Jul-2019
Location: Freiburg, Germany
Contact: Malte Rosemeyer

Workshop description:

This workshop analyzes the use of interrogatives from a discourse-pragmatic perspective, with a focus on Romance languages. We are particularly interested in the following questions:

(a) Can we predict whether or not an interrogative will be used at a specific point in discourse?
(b) Which kinds of interpretation can interrogatives receive and are there formal correlates of these discourse functions?
(c) Which language-specific differences exist in Romance and elsewhere regarding this form-function relationship ?

Specific topics addressed by the talks in the workshop are the use of interrogatives to express discourse functions other than questions, the influence of formal features such as intonation, negation and tense on the interpretation of interrogatives, and the variation between different syntactic interrogative constructions such as ex-situ vs. in-situ wh-interrogatives.

Time and venue:

July 16, 2019 at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Haus zur Lieben Hand, Großer Saal (1. OG), Löwenstraße 16, 79098 Freiburg

Funding:
Dr. Jürgen und Irmgard Ulderup-Stiftung

Program:

09:00 – 09:15
Opening
Malte Rosemeyer (Freiburg/Leuven) & Daniel Jacob (Freiburg)

09:15 – 10:00
Asking for confirmation: the bias of interronegatives
Pierre Larrivée (Caen)

Coffee break

10:30 – 11:15
Wh-headlines in German. Some remarks on their origin and uses
Rita Finkbeiner & Robert Külpmann (Düsseldorf)

11:15 – 12:00
Overt questions: a repair initiating strategy?
Daniel Jacob (Freiburg)

Lunch break

14:00 – 14:45
Disentangling wh-questions in Hebrew
Pavel Ozerov (Münster)

14:45 – 15:30
¿Qué vas a saber vos de talento? Spanish future-inflected wh-interrogatives from an interactional perspective
María Sol Sansiñena (Leuven) & Malte Rosemeyer (Freiburg/Leuven)

Coffee break

16:00 – 16:45
A contrastive perspective on Italian and French wh-in-situ questions. A discourse-pragmatic approach
Davide Garassino (Zürich)

16:45 -17:15
Final discussion