Questions in Discourse

The workshop focuses on the interaction of form and meaning of linguistic expressions with questions in discourse. It is well known that such an interaction exists, for instance, focus in an answer often corresponds to the wh-word in an explicit or implicit question, and some verbs can even embed overt or concealed questions. Recently, however, important progress has been achieved in this regard.

On the one hand, it has been shown that questions, in particular the question under discussion, affects the interpretation of natural language utterances more deeply than previously assumed, for instance, the interpretation of discourse particles seem to strongly depend on the question under discussion (Beaver & Clark 2008) and even classical phenomena such as presupposition projection have recently been argued to depend on the question under discussion in a substantial way (Simons et al 2010).

On the other hand, recent developments in Inquisitive Semantics (Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009) suggests that the class of natural language expressions that give rise to alternatives and invite the hearer to choose between these alternative includes not only questions but also all kinds of expressions related to disjunction and indefinites. This gives a new perspective on the meaning of natural language expressions in general as suggesting one or more potential updates of the common ground, and it gives rise to new tools in pragmatics e.g. for the computation of quantity implicatures and the grammatical structure of answers.

The workshop hosts both theoretical work and empirical case studies that discuss the ways in which questions can be captured in a discourse model, the interaction of questions with the interpretation of other expressions, and the inquisitive nature of disjunctive, indefinite, and interrogative constructions.