Conjectural speech acts in Cuzco Quechua

Abstract

Conjectural questions are questions that do not expect an answer, but only express the speaker's curiosity about the issue. This paper proposes an analysis of conjectural wh-questions in Cuzco Quechua and argues that the conjectural =chá makes the same kind of contribution in interrogatives as it does in declaratives. First, it adds the condition that the evidence holder's (the speaker in declaratives, the addressee in interrogatives) reasoning bears on the issue under discussion. Second, while canonical assertions and questions expect that the addressee will commit to either the proposition expressed by a declarative or to one of the possible answers denoted by an interrogative, their conjectural counterparts do not have this expectation. The proposed analysis of the conjectural is couched within an extended version of the commitment-based discourse framework of Farkas and Bruce (2010). It differs from previous analyses of conjectural questions in analyzing the conjectural condition as a speaker commitment about the current context rather than a constraint on possible responses by the addressee.