Abstract
Abstract The French wh-word comment ’how’ may be used with a reason interpretation, that is in a question that inquires about how the situation described by the proposition that follows comment (the pseudo-prejacent) might occur or have occurred, which goes against the expectations of the speaker. In this paper, we report on a rating study whose goal was to understand the extent to which reason-comment questions – compared to manner-comment questions – are interpreted as having some questioning force or, conversely, as being rhetorical. We also test whether reason-comment questions express a certain degree of surprise and confirm our hypothesis that with reason-comment questions the speaker tries to recover from an expectation failure, while results concerning the questioning force show that reason-comment questions can be true questions (though questioning is not their sole function), and invalidate analyses that systematically treat them as rhetorical questions.
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