The complexity of ‘questions’ or ‘interrogatives’ as a linguistic topic can be attributed broadly to two factors: on the one hand, there is the interaction of the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic (corresponding to the terms ‘interrogative clause/structure’, ‘question’ and ‘request for information’) and on the other the great variety of formal devices involved in producing different types of interrogatives (or questions): the various WH words involved in so-called partial interrogatives and the different strategies that set this type of clause apart from declaratives – variations on word order, the use of interrogative particles and prosodic signals.

This welcome volume, devoted to various aspects of questions and interrogatives, appears in Diane Vincent's series ‘Langue et pratiques discursives’, and gathers together ten articles based on papers given at a conference at the University of Fribourg in 2003. But it is clear from the length of the contributions (over twenty pages in most cases) that they are much-expanded versions of the original papers. The volume opens with an Introduction by two of the editors, Anna Razgouliaeva and Corinne Rossari, presenting the theme of the book and the individual papers, and the ten chapters that follow are grouped into four sections, according to the main approach adopted by each: historical, syntactic, pragma-semantic (more commonly, ‘semantico-pragmatic’ in English) or prosodic. The historical section includes Gabriel Bergounioux's ‘La question dans l'histoire de la grammaire: de l'ordre des mots à l'interaction’ and Gilles Siouffi's ‘Aspects rhétoriques, logiques et grammaticaux de la question: réflexions à partir de quelques grammairiens classiques (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)’. Bergounioux's chapter is well illustrated with extracts from various grammarians and shows how the various markers of interrogativity have been treated, and then highlights the growing roles of psychology and of what we now call pragmatics since the late nineteenth century. In his study of grammarians of the classical period, Siouffi observes that l'interrogation was more commonly seen as belonging to rhetoric rather than to grammar, and that they thereby anticipated the pragmatic approach of more recent times. The syntactic section similarly comprises two contributions: ‘De la question à l'hypothèse: aspects d'un phénomène de coalescence’ by Marie-José Béguelin and Gilles Corminbœuf and ‘La question en quoi’ by Florence Lefeuvre (cf. also Lefeuvre, 2006). Béguelin and Corminbœuf provide a detailed study of the use of inversion to convey a hypothetical proposition in complex sentences (e.g. Restait-on dehors, on fondait au soleil; Vienne la tempête, on double les amarres), while the latter focuses on the semantic and syntactic properties of interrogatives formed with quoi, and how its distribution differs from que. Section 3, devoted to semantico-pragmatic approaches, includes five chapters, the subject matter of each being fairly clear from the title: ‘La valeur négative de l'interrogation totale: son influence sur l'interprétation des interrogatives portant sur des concessives et sur des conditionnelles’ (Oswald Ducrot); ‘Le questionnement au moyen de wieso: polyphonie et argumentation dans la question partielle’ (Sibylle Sauerwein Spinola); ‘Question et mémoire discursive’ (Alain Berendonner); ‘Les questions totales: une évocation de l'état de connaissances de l'autre’ (Corinne Rossari); ‘Flou et polyvalence de la question rhétorique: l'exemple des Fables de La Fontaine’ (Marc Bonhomme). The last of these includes a semantico-pragmatic typology of questions, set out in an admirably clear diagram, and constructed on the basis of two parameters: (a) whether the questioner knows, suspects or doesn't know the answer; and (b) whether the answer is to be provided by an addressee or by the questioner. The final part of the book comprises just one chapter: ‘Des marquages prosodiques de la question dans l'interaction’ by Anne Grobet, Antoine Auchlin and Anne Catherine Simon. One of their main conclusions is that there is no simple correspondence between question type and intonation contour. There is no general index, but there is a set of biographical notes on the authors of the various chapters. The volume has been well produced and is very reasonably priced at CDN$ 26.