LingLunch : Yoo, Tovena, Brunetti

Hi-Yon Yoo, Lucia Tovena et Lisa Brunetti (LLF)
French 'comment’ questions with a reason interpretation

This talk is about some semantic/pragmatic aspects of French questions starting with “comment” (how) in their interpretations of manner or of reason. We investigate if and how these properties are reflected by prosody. With reason-“comment" questions, the speaker conveys her surprise at the proposition associated with the question radical, like in ‘how come’ questions but minus the presupposition. Possible additional emotions are exasperation, anger, fear, etc.

In order to analyse the prosody of these questions, we conducted a production experiment comparing the reason and the manner readings. Results showed that the difference mostly lies in the final tune, which is a specific high plateau pattern !H*!H% in reason questions, different from both the manner one and the tune expected if the question was purely rhetorical. Other prosodic as well as phonetic cues are associated with the reason reading, mainly to express surprise and other emotions related to expectation disconfirmation. A rating study is finally presented whose double goal was to understand to which extent reason-“comment" questions (compared to manner ones) were interpreted as having some questioning force or as being rhetorical, and the degree of surprise they conveyed. Results confirmed the specificity of reason-“comment” questions, which displayed different degrees of questioning force (sometimes drifting towards a rhetorical reading), combined with a high degree of surprise.