Answering overt wh-questions

Abstract

Abstract It-clefts in English, their French and German counterparts and pre-verbal focus in Hungarian have been claimed to be semantically related constructions. For example, É. Kiss (1998) terms them identificational focus and Destruel et al. (2015) coin them inquiry-terminating (IT) constructions. Despite their similarities, these constructions also exhibit one major distributional difference: Clefts are usually no natural answers to overt wh-questions whereas pre-verbal focus in Hungarian constitutes the default question-answering strategy. In this paper, I show that it is possible to account for this difference within the Rational Speech Act model (Frank & Goodman 2012) without assuming any semantic differences between the structures. Thereby, I capitalize on the number of alternative constructions that could be used to answer overt wh-questions in the various languages under discussion and on a remarkable semantic property of the constructions under discussion that relates to the way they encode exhaustivity.