What can be echoed?

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Angelika Kiss

University of Toronto

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Abstract

It has been observed that echo declarative questions (EQs) that attribute commitment to the Addressee are not necessarily literal echoes of the previous utterance. EQs can echo the informative content of the proposition conveyed by the previous utterance (van der Sandt 1991); they can target its formal properties such as word order, phonetics (1a), or its register (Poschmann 2008); one can echo the illocutionary act expressed by the latest move (1b), and one does not even need a previous utterance, because situations, too, can be echoed (1c) (Noh, 1998).

 

(1)        a.         You called the POlice? You called the poLICE!

            b.         You’re giving me orders?
            c.          Context: A is about to leave with her dog.
                        A to B: You’re leaving with your dog?

           

Cheung (2008, 2009) observed that the Negative Wh-Construction (NWHC) expresses propositional negation:

 

(2)        Since when is John watching TV now?!                                                  (Cheung 2009 (1b))

 

Kiss (2017) claims that in languages that have NWHCs both with the question word since when and where, the former can target various aspects of a previous utterance: formal properties, register, as well as other inferences related to the propositional content; while the latter can only express propositional negation. 

 

Both questions show similarities with metalinguistic negation (Horn 1985) and thus involve metarepresentation (Noh 1998), although in slightly different ways: EQs add a final rise to the metarepresentation (Gunlogson 2001, Poschmann 2008), since when-questions typically have a falling final contour and they have wh-phrases (Kiss 2017).

            We argue that they can target the same range of aspects of the previous utterance or situation, and that this range is wider than what has been proposed in the literature, containing the time and place of the latest move, and the rhetorical relations underlying it. (3) shows the three aspects of a speech act (Searle 1969) and a fourth group for cases without any previous utterance; both question types can target all of these.

 

(3)        a. Utterance act:         phonetic act, the time and place of the utterance event, register

            b. Propositional act:    information content (van der Sandt 1991), propositional attitude,

                                                rhetorical relations (Asher & Lascarides 2003)

            c. Illocutionary act:     the illocutionary act itself
            d. Situation:                 any contextually relevant aspect