Information packaging in questions
Elisabet Engdahl · 2006
Linguists who study information structure often use questions as a way of setting the context so that it elicits a particular focus-ground partitioning in the answer. But few researchers have looked into the way the questions themselves are structured.1 In this article I will discuss some commonways that questions are realized in spoken interaction in English, French, German and Swedish. It turns out that the way questions are realized is rather systematically correlated with the speaker’s view of what the hearer might know and what has happened so far in the conversation. Let me first establish some terminology. By information structure I understand the structuring of utterances into a focal (new, informative, rhematic) part and a ground (known, contextually bound, thematic) part. This structuring reflects the speaker’s view of the hearer’s information state at the time of the utterance. By information packaging I understand the way this structuring is realised by syntactic, morphological, and/or prosodic means (cf Vallduvi and Engdahl, 1996). In section 2, I illustrate how question-answer pairs are commonly used to establish the focus of an utterance. In section 3, I introduce a model of a dialogue participant’s information state inspired by Ginzburg (to appear). With this formal apparatus we turn in section 4 to a survey of the information packaging of information questions, i.e. requests for information. In section 5 I look closer at questions that arise when a dialogue participant has failed to understand a previous utterance. Finally, in section 6, I bring up some examples of declaratives used as questions.