Wer kanndenn schon jasagen?

Abstract

The article explores German discourse particles (DiPs) in rhetorical wh-questions (wh-RQs). While schon (roughly ‘unexpectedly’) only marks rhetorical wh-questions, denn (roughly ‘I wonder’) marks contextually arising information-seeking or rhetorical Questions under Discussion (QuDs), with or without schon. Since ja (roughly ‘unquestionably’) marks shared information, it is incompatible with questions by itself, but occasionally occurs in wh-RQs left of DiPs like schon instead of denn. The results of two acceptability judgment experiments confirm that ja is strongly dispreferred in RQs, the presence of schon improves RQs with and without ja, and denn has no effect on acceptability. A follow-up study further indicated the rhetorical reading of our target questions to prevail independently from DiPs. We conclude that ja in RQs operates on the information contributed by elements like schon, denoting roughly that the issue in question arises ‘unquestionably against expectations’. Our contexts were neutral regarding the discourse functions of ja and denn (side remarks vs. QuDs), unlike the contexts of the findings, from which we deduce that the marked ja schon-RQs, while grammatical, require specific felicity conditions. A first attempt to confirm this experimentally was globally unsuccessful and could only reveal potential hints in an exploratory analysis.

The interaction of discourse markers and prosody in rhetorical questions in German

“…The most frequent DiP, denn, occurred in both ISQs and RQs and in both polar and wh-questions, although it did not occur in polar RQs. We therefore consider denn neutral regarding illocution type, which fits in with prior research on DiPs in RQs stating that denn does not favour one or the other reading of a question (Thurmair 1989;Viesel & Freitag 2019) and is equally possible in both interrogative sentence types (Theiler 2021). However, we found that DiPs etwa, denn þ x and schon occurred in RQs, only, and we therefore consider them markers of rhetorical meaning.…”

“…We do give explanations where a DiP has both a lexical and a discourse meaning (e.g., additional auch ‘also’, temporal schon ‘already’) and we add the discourse meaning the DiPs contribute to the respective examples. Note that Viesel & Freitag (2019: 243) translate denn ‘I wonder’, and schon ‘against expectations’ (see also Thurmair 1989). Research on the meaning contribution of DiPs in RQs is still ongoing (see Zimmermann 2011 for a more general overview of their distribution and interpretation and interaction with sentence type).…”

Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children

“…In addition, the use of denn signals that the speaker is concerned about the answer, which is not the case for CLRD, making denn a potentially stronger cue to rhetoricity than CLRD. In its rhetorical use, schon translates as ‘against expectations’ (Viesel and Freitag, 2019: 1), being similar to the counter-expectational adversative Italian particle ma .…”