Questions that are merely posed, not asked
When
3 – 5 p.m., March 21, 2025
Title: Questions that are merely posed, not asked
Abstract: A number of languages have ways of marking a question as one that is merely posed and that the addressee is not obligated to answer. Examples include Greek "araye", Turkish "acaba", Japanese "naa", German verb final questions with "wohl", and many others. These merely posed questions raise important issues for the semantics and pragmatics of questions and for the general picture of how sentences are being used in context to perform speech acts. In this talk, we explore the phenomenon and its theoretical consequences.