Pragmatic and multimodal approaches to questioning

The project on interrogation will extend the work carried out on exclamation, due to the intersubjective function of direct interrogation and because exclamation borrows from interrogation to express the inexpressible. The exploration will focus on the central characteristics of interrogation. Interrogation has an illocutionary status that is characterised 1/ by its intersubjective function in direct questions; 2/ by its relationship with epistemic modality both in 2a/ questions (direct questions, which submit a problem of knowledge to a co-speaker) and in 2b/ perlocutionary questions (interrogative clauses, which derive their status from the host structure). This characteristic (2) raises the question of plurimodality (the coexistence of multiple modalities – epistemic and appreciative, epistemic and radical deontic, epistemic and radical dynamic, epistemic and alethic, epistemic and epistemic, etc.) and the compatibilities between modalities.

Other aspects will be addressed from a plurimodal perspective: the morphology and syntax of direct and indirect questions, and the modal criteria that enable indirect questions to be identified; the place of Qu- / Wh- paradigms in the (paradigmatic) system of indefinites; structures and paradigmatic adverbials compatible with interrogatives; complex proforms (to be defined); rhetorical questions (which subvert modality) in argumentative, sarcastic, or ironic contexts. An in-depth examination of each of these aspects will shed useful light on plurimodality.

The team plans to enrich this approach to multimodal questioning by building two bridges: on the one hand, to the work of the Speech and Language Laboratory (AMU) on prosody; and secondly to work on multimodality (gestures, postures, eye contact, semiotics, etc.), which is becoming more widespread in the wake of Kress.

Planned achievements: biannual meeting with the Dialectology and Formal Linguistics team; issue of Corpus on the theme of Questioning and Corpora; collaboration with the LPL (AMU) to organise a study day in 2018; submission of an IDEX project to Académie 5: ‘Exploring Modality Interactions in Questioning’.