Interfaces Ethernet y comando de monitorización del Interfaz

In this section, I survey the main object of this study, i.e., the type of wh-EQs which I am going to deal with throughout this chapter. As the discussion proceeds, some general pragmatic and semantic properties of wh-EQs will be established.

2.1. Contrastive wh-questions vs. wh-EQs

First, as already mentioned, in this dissertation I restrict my attention to wh-EQ (i.e., questions that reproduce a sentence previously pronounced by a different speaker) and leave aside other types of non-canonical questions with wh-in-situ. As is well known, wh-in-situ structures are allowed in many languages with overt

wh-fronting; such questions require a particular discourse-pragmatic context and

trigger a particular reading, with a strong presupposition (e.g. for English, see Bolinger 1978; Pires & Taylor 2007; for French, see Cheng 1997; Cheng & Rooryck 2000; Bošković 1998a, 2000; Mathieu 2004; for Spanish, see Jiménez 1997; Uribe-Etxebarria 2002; Etxepare & Uribe-Etxebarria 2005, 2012; Reglero 2007; for Italian dialects, see Munaro 1997; Poletto & Polock 2004; Manzini & Savoia 2011b; for Greek, see Grohmann & Papadopoulou 2011; Vlachos 2012). Such non- echo wh-in-situ questions are exemplified below for English and Spanish:

(4) a. And you did it why? (English)

b. And it happened as a result of what? [from Bolinger 1978:135]

(5) a. Y tu padre compró ¿qué? (Spanish)

and your father bough what ‘And your father bought what?’ a. Y tú has venido ¿por qué?

and you have.2SG come why

‘And you have come why?’

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Observe that the questions in (4) and (5) do not get the echo interpretation, for a simple reason that they do not reproduce any previous sentence. As argued in Jiménez (1997) and Uribe-Etxebarria (2002) (see also Etxepare & Uribe- Etxebarria 2005, 2012), such questions are necessarily linked to the previous context, but, unlike EQs, they do not ask about what has been said. Rather, they ask about a strong presupposition following from the context. As reported in Jiménez (1997), the wh-in-situ question in (5a) first requires a context such as (6). Only then the speaker can utter (5a), under the assumption that the father bought something from the pre-established set (eggs, milk and coffee).

(6) Context for the wh-in-situ question in (5a):

My father, my mother and I went to the store to buy eggs, milk and coffee.

My mother bought the eggs. [from Jiménez 1997:42]

Therefore, such wh-in-situ questions quantify about a heavily restricted domain, established through the context. Moreover, observe that such questions tend to begin with a copulative conjunction and, which contributes to the distribution of the events between different agents. As argued in Uribe-Etxebarria (2002), in Spanish wh-in-situ qustions the elements preceding the wh-word are generally interpreted as a contrastive topic, while the wh-item denotes a pre-established set of items. Obviously, such questions trigger very different semantics (and syntax)

from EQs, so their analysis falls aside from the scope of this dissertation.1

2.2. Unheard vs. amazement wh-EQs

As already stated, wh-EQs are pronounced in immediate response to an utterance to request for repetition or to express surprise. Following Bartels (1997), I call the former type unheard EQs and the latter amazement EQs. In this dissertation I restrict my attention to the former type of EQs, which request for repetition of the unheard part of the echoed utterance.

The main reason for such restriction is quite simple. I assume that only unheard, or request-for-repetition EQs are interrogative constructions, as opposed to amazement EQs, whose meaning is rather reminiscent of an exclamative. Unheard wh-EQs seek to reduce speaker’s ignorance, as opposed to amazement EQs. Following Fiengo (2007), I assume that questions arise from ignorance: when a speaker asks a question she presents herself as being ignorant in certain aspect and seeks to complete the lack of information. For instance, when asking a

1 _{For different analyses of wh-in-situ non-echo questions in Spanish, the reader is referred to}

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canonical yes/no-question, the speaker signals that she does not know whether the assertion on which the question is based is true or false. When asking a

wh-question, the speaker presents herself as being unable to complete the

proposition in a satisfactory way, since she lacks some portion of information, corresponding to the wh-phrase.

In particular, when asking a wh-EQ, the speaker seeks to complete her knowledge about what has been said. As pointed out by Fiengo (2007:76), by using as a question an ‘undeformed’ utterance (i.e., a question with wh-in-situ), the speaker presents herself “as being unable to complete the utterance in a satisfactory way” and asks the addressee to repeat a missing bit of language.

Wh-EQs are strongly related to the previous context, in the sense that their

semantics is partially determined by the immediately prior utterance; i.e., they are D-linked in certain sense (see Pesetsky 1987, 2000). As stated in Carnie (2006:340), “echo questions are not requests for new information; instead they are requests for confirmation of something someone has heard”. For this reason, wh-EQs sometimes are referred to as backward citations (Escandell 1999) or reprise questions (Ginsburg & Sag 2000), since these interrogatives repeat or ‘quote’ a sentence originally pronounced by a different speaker. Escandell (2002:873) argues that, from a pragmatic point of view, EQs are “specialised as interpretations of attributed representations: they are interrogative interpretations of interpretations of somebody’s thoughts, or, put in other words,

they are metarepresentations”.2

In this dissertation I restrict my attention to wh-EQs and leave total, or

yes/no EQs aside. Generally, the latter constitute a type of amazement EQs

which do not contain any wh-word. They just repeat the previous utterance as a whole, in order to express the speaker’s attitude such as surprise, disbelief, astonishment, etc.:

(7) Amazement yes/no EQ (English)

a. U: I am going to Pakistan for vacation.

b. EQ: You are going to Pakistan for vacation?! (I can’t believe it!)3

2 _{For a detailed characterization of EQs as a metalinguistic phenomenon see also Noh (1998),}

Iwata (2003) and references therein.

3 _{In Spanish, there is a particular type of amazement wh-EQs, the so-called cuasi-echo questions}

(Dumitrescu 1992c). Such EQs are introduced by a wh-word cómo ‘how’ followed by a complementizer que ‘that’, as exemplified in (i). Here I leave this type of EQs for future research.

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As the reader may notice, by uttering the EQ in (7b), the speaker does not present herself as being unable to complete the proposition, since she has perfectly heard and understood the previous utterance. Rather, the questioneer of (7b) indicates that she does not accept the interlocutor’s or her own grounds for what has been said. In other words, there is no real speaker’s ignorance behind the

question in (7b).4 _{(For more information on this type of EQs, the reader is}

referred to Escandell 2002, Fiengo 2007 and references therein).

Turning to wh-constructions, consider the pairs of examples in (8) and (9), corresponding to amazement and unheard wh-EQs respectively:

(8) Amazement wh-EQ (English)

a. U: Mary read War and Peace.

b. EQ: Mary read WHATE?

(9) Unheard wh-EQ (English)

a. U: Mary read (mumble).

b. EQ: Mary read whatE?

Consider first the amazement wh-EQ in (8b). Suppose that the speaker thinks that Mary only reads feminine journals like Cosmopolitan or similar. So, by uttering (8b), the speaker expresses her disbelief or surprise when hearing the assertion in (8a), that Mary read Tolstoj’s War and Peace. The part of the utterance which generates speaker’s surprise is replaced by an exclamative

wh-word what. Since such wh-words are generally pronounced with a particular

strong stress, I mark them with capital letters in the corresponding examples. In contrast, in the case of the unheard wh-EQ in (9b), the speaker does not quite hear a part of the utterance in (9a) and echoes it just as it is, except for the unheard part, which is replaced by an echo-introduced, interrogative wh-word,

what.

(i) a. ¿Cuándo volverá Juan? (Spanish)

when will.come.back.3SG Juan

‘When will come back Juan?’

b. ¿Cómo que cuándo volverá Juan?

how that when will.come.back.3SG Juan

‘What do you mean by “when will come back Juan?”?’

4 _{Another speaker’s intention behind the total EQ in (4b) consists in that she tries to confirm}

that the previous utterance has been heard or understood correctly. In this case the speaker does not express any amazement, but rather an ignorance whether what she has heard is true. Observe that the EQ in (7b) is an echo yes/no question.

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I assume that unheard wh-EQs are interrogative constructions from a semantic point of view. Similarly to ordinary wh-questions, such wh-EQs denote a set of possible propositions (see Comorowski 1989; Ginsburg & Sag 2000; Arnstein 2002; Šimík 2009). More precisely, wh-EQs denote a property of properties of propositions, in the sense that they denote a set of possible utterances produced by the addressee. This type of EQs seeks to reduce the speaker’s ignorance regarding the missed item, under which the proposition contained within the utterance is true. This is illustrated in (10a), which represents the meaning of the unheard wh-EQ in (9b). In contrast, amazement wh-EQs denote a singleton set (i.e., a single proposition), since the speaker knows exactly what has been said. This is shown in (10b), corresponding to the semantics of the amazement EQ in (8b):

(10) a. Meaning of the unheard wh-EQ (9b)

VMary read what?W = {(you said) Mary read War and Peace, (you said) Mary read Ulissess...}

b. Meaning of the amazement wh-EQ (8b)

VMary read WHAT?W = {(you said) Mary read War and Peace}

Semantically, by uttering an unheard wh-EQ, the speaker seeks to reduce her ignorance about the properties of the ongoing discourse (see Fiengo 2007; Šimík 2009). That is, the question in (9b) does not exactly ask the addressee what is the title of the book that Mary read, but rather it asks to repeat the unheard portion of the stimulus. Notice that echo wh-words are referential, in the sense that they always refer back to a referent which has been already mentioned in the immediately previous discourse. In other words, the speaker of the unheard

wh-EQ in (9b) requests the addressee to complete the unheard utterance in (9a)

and to assign a value to the echo wh-word. Therefore, the answer War and Peace would be a felicitous response if the echoed utterance indeed has been the one in (9a), Mary read War and Peace. However, the same answer would be unfelicitous if the addressee of the EQ has said Mary read Ulissess or Mary read

Cosmopolitan, etc.

In contrast, amazement wh-EQs must not be genuinly answered, since they activate scalar inferences and the speaker’s subjective believes. In (8b), the exclamative echo wh-phrase substitutes a component of the utterance which is the least expected one on the scale of possible items that Mary could read. To make this point clearer, consider the following dialogue between two speakers, A and B:

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(11) a. A: We're going to Pakistan on vacation. (English)

b. B: You're going WHEREE on vacation?!

c. A: Well, the nature is beautiful there. [from Šimík 2009:5]

Pakistan is the least expected place to go on vacation for the speaker B, so that it is substituted with the echo wh-word in the amazement wh-EQ (11b). However, observe that the speaker B does not ask to assign a value for the wh-word, because it is already known (Pakistan). Rather, she seeeks for an explanation or some additional information, like (11c). Notice that the response in (11c) would be unfelicitous under request-for-repetition reading of the EQ in (11b). Suppose that the speaker did not hear quite well the utternace in (11a) and asks the question in (12a) below, which induces a weaker stress on the echo wh-word than under the amazement reading. This question denotes a set of possible propositions, in which the felicitous response is the one that enables the speaker to complete the previous assertion in a satisfactory way. That is, the only felicitous answer to the unheard EQ in (12a) is the one in (12b) (in the following examples, R states for ‘response’):

(12) a. EQ: You're going whereE on vacation?! (English)

b. R: (We are going) to Pakistan.

c. R: * Well, the nature is beautiful there.

To sum up, I assume that only unheard, request-for-repetition EQs are interrogatives, while amazement EQs are semantically (and, perhaps, syntactically) closer to exclamatives. Consequently, here I restrict my attention to the interrogative type of wh-EQs (henceforth, simply wh-EQs). By doing so, I limit the scope of the formal analysis I am going to argue for to a definable class of constructions which share certain crucial (syntactic and semantic) properties with true wh-questions. I leave open the question on whether the analysis I develop in this chapter can be extended to amazement EQs.