LingLunch: Jan Fliessbach, Lucia M. Tovena, Damien Fleury 

Jan Fliessbach (University of Potsdam),  Lucia Tovena, (LLF/UPC) et  Damien Fleury (LLF/UPC)
How person and discourse role contribute to the interpretation of comment questions 

The French wh-phrase comment (how/why) may be used to inquire about a manner, means, or method, understood as properties of events, or a reason, understood as a semantic proposition. In this talk, we report on a corpus study that investigates how the readings of comment questions in dialogue correlate with the grammatical person and number of the subject, and howthis effect is moderated by tense. We find that manner readings typically involve third-person subjects, particularly in non-past tenses; method readings tend to be associated with first-person subjects, especially in the future tense; and reason readings occur predominantly with second-person singular subjects, particularly in the present tense. For first-person subject questions, only the past tense favours reason readings. We interpret these effects as reflecting key properties of the dialogical context, supporting a view of person and tense as discourse-sensitive indicators of epistemic roles. These associations between person and comment readings are compatible with broader cross-linguistic patterns involving egophoricity and evidential access, despite the fact that French lacks dedicated morphological markers for these categories.