LingLunch : Agnès Celle

Agnès Celle (CLILLAC-ARP)
How evidential are conjectural questions?

This talk is about the epistemic conditional in polar questions in French. It is argued that the form of polar questions (ie interrogative vs. declarative) accounts for different types of bias which interact with the conditional to produce various modal meanings and discourse effects. Biased questions are shown to steer the common ground to a new information state in an attempt to achieve epistemic control. By providing a better understanding of biased questions, I will propose a new approach to the epistemic conditional in light of recent studies of evidentiality. Across languages, evidential markers in questions are reported to either trigger a perspective flip from speaker to addressee or to modify the illocutionary force by remaining anchored to the speaker. As the conditional falls into the latter category, this suggests that the inferential capacity of the conditional in questions derives from its hypothetical meaning. This argues in favour of an approach that reconciles evidential extensions with the core modal nature of the conditional.