Exploiting polar questions for expressive purposes: “Queclaratives” and “whimperatives” in Modern Greek

Abstract

Interrogative sentences that are typically used for the expression of polar questions are also cross-linguistically engaged in the expression of emphatic assertions or of kind requests. Rather than taking this fact for granted, the present paper attempts an explanation for this engagement. Assuming that ‘eliciting a yes/no answer on the part of the addressee’ is the “basic story stuff” of polar questions, it argues that question-like utterances that have the force of an emphatic assertion or of a kind request, “recount” this basic story in their own ways. In particular, it maintains that Traugott's and Langacker's competing treatments of ‘subjectification’ may complementarily shed light, from their own distinct perspectives, on the contextually-induced rearrangements of the inner “events” of this yes/no polarity – in fact, metonymic rearrangements that result in two expressive “narratives” of the initial story.