Questions and epistemic stance: Some examples from Italian conversations

Abstract

Through the analysis of presuppositions, question design, social action and preference organisation in short fragments of Italian question-answer sequences, this paper aims to show that (1) wh-questions, on the one hand, and alternative and polar questions (i.e., polar interrogatives, tag and declarative questions), on the other, come from two different epistemic positions: unknowing and uncertain, respectively; (2) alternative and polar questions convey different degrees of uncertainty, thus placing themselves in different points along the epistemic continuum of the uncertain position.