Towards a typology of echo questions

Voprosy Jazykoznanija. 2025. No. 3. P. 7–29.

Симонова Т. В.

Over the past half century, the analysis of questions has played an important role in the development
of the syntactic theory. Despite this, echo questions have been given quite little attention, and
most studies on echo questions focused on data from a single language. In this paper, I review strategies
of forming echo questions of different types in 32 languages from five macroareas. For this purpose,
I used a series of descriptive grammars based on Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire designed
by Comrie and Smith (1977). I consider an echo question an instance of reported speech but
with interrogative illocutionary force and define a derivation strategy as a set of features by which the
echo question differs from the stimulus sentence. Each strategy is a combination of the following parameters:
1) the marking of the sentence part that signals quotation (M-part); 2) the marking of an interrogative
semantic component; 3) the presence or absence of the pronominal deictic shift. An M-part
can be a clause, while the part with the reported content (R-part) can be formally dependent or independent
from it. An M-part can also be an affix, clitic, particle or remain unexpressed. An interrogative
semantic component is usually expressed by intonation, an interrogative affix, clitic, particle, or pronoun.
Among the languages of my sample, the most frequent strategies of forming echo questions are
those in which the M-part is not expressed.

Ключевые слова: interrogative constructions, grammatical typology, speech acts, echo questions, cross-linguistic sample

ПУБЛИКАЦИЯ ПОДГОТОВЛЕНА ПО РЕЗУЛЬТАТАМ ПРОЕКТА: Языковое и когнитивное многообразие в формальных моделях, компьютерных инструментах и образовательных ресурсах (2025)