The connection between prosodic realisations of German Wh-questions and their pragmatic embeddings

Abstract

We hypothesise that a speaker using falling intonation on a Wh-question, which corresponds to the default contour in German, indicates to their addressee the possibility to respond with a null-answer like “nobody” or “nothing”. With a rising intonation, on the other hand, the speaker is supposed to explicitly deny the possibility of such an answer due to prior knowledge that the existential implication of the question is true. We ran two perception experiments, in which participants were exposed to two types of contexts, either allowing or disallowing the null-answer, followed by either a rising or a falling Wh-question. Results show that participants did not integrate context and contour. Nevertheless, both variables influenced the participants’ acceptability ratings. Results are discussed in terms of semantics and pragmatics of questions.