The prosody of French rhetorical questions

Abstract

Abstract Besides information-seeking questions, there are all kinds of non-standard questions, whose function is not to request information from the addressee, but rather to convey information about the speaker’s epistemic or emotional state. These include rhetorical questions, surprise questions, incredulity questions, etc. This paper focuses on rhetorical questions (RQs), a sub-type of non-canonical questions, and presents the first production experiment which has investigated them in French to date. We compared string-identical rhetorical and information seeking questions (ISQs) in French. Experimental design and preliminary results are presented and discussed. In the final part of the paper, we discuss possible correlations between these findings and the semantic and pragmatic properties that distinguish RQs from ISQs.