Linguistische Berichte Heft 269

This paper provides a survey of our knowledge of the prosody of rhetorical questions, i.e. questions that do not require an answer and try to commit the listener to the presupposed answer, as compared to the prosody of string-identical genuine, information seeking-questions. The survey includes semantic literature on questions, corpus data, and experimental evidence from production and perception experiments. It covers a range of typologically different languages (German, English, Icelandic, Italian, Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, French) that have different word-level and phrase-level characteristics. The main finding is that rhetorical and information seeking questions differ reliably in terms of the following prosodic characteristics: (i) f0-features (e.g., position and type of pitch accent, type of boundary tone, as well as more global f0-parameters, depending on language type); (ii) duration / speaking rate (rhetorical questions are typically longer / produced with slower speaking rate than information-seeking questions). Often, but not always, rhetorical questions are produced with non-modal voice quality.

The paper discusses a prominent one of Kratzer’s (1986, 1991, 2012) arguments against material implication analyses of the denotation of (indicative) conditional sentences. This is the argument based on the sentence Most of the time, if a man buys a horse, he pays cash for it. It is shown that material implication makes a prediction that does conform to speakers’ intuitions, contrary to Kratzer’s claim. The paper also argues that Lewis’s (1975) attack on material implication analyses of conditional sentences based on examples where the conditional is embedded under the adverbials sometimes and never does not have much force given that the interpretation of such sentences is subject to inferential pragmatic operations in addition to the recovery of theirdenotation.

In contrast to printed letters, handwritten texts show a larger amount of variation regarding letter shape and letter contact. This variation though might not be totally random but could follow a certain grammatical or structural function. By analysing a corpus of 10.117 graphs written by four writers, this paper explores which structures and which functions correlate. More precisely, it will be shown that the shape of certain letters might indicate syllabic, morphologic od prosodic structures. In addition, it will be shown that handwritten texts present the words’ structure better than printed texts could do. Overall, this paper points out how handwritten scripts show the graphematic principles known from printing even better than printed texts do.