When I was studying for my MA at the University of York, I was working principally on the syntax of dative constructions. Every time I thought I had cracked a problem, a little more research would turn up a twelve-year-old paper by Elena Anagnostopoulou, proposing a vastly superior version of the solution I thought I had so cleverly come upon.

As my time within linguistics has lengthened and my experience grown, this happens to me less and less … or rather, the timescale is a little shorter, and, having settled more comfortably at the interface between syntax and pragmatics, the personnel are different. After spending some time thinking about how a typology of non-canonical questions might be adequately captured, along comes Andreas Trotzke’s (2023) monograph, titled Non-Canonical Questions. This work does an important job of problematising and scrutinising the role of the left periphery in recent popular approaches to understanding non-canonical questions, in particular interrogatively marked clauses that deviate from a question’s canonical function of requesting new information by also expressing emotion or epistemic stance on the part of the speaker. To set the scene for the review to follow, some core examples of the non-canonical questions at issue in the text are given in (1)–(4):

Trotzke is well placed to take on this task, given his extensive work on a range of phenomena related to non-canonical questions, especially discourse particles and non-canonical word order. He is, moreover, a co-editor of the volume Expressive Meanings across Linguistic Levels and Frameworks with Xavier Villalba (Trotzke & Villalba Reference Trotzke and Villalba2021). Indeed, this latter serves well as a companion volume to the monograph, since some of its chapters inform the empirical and theoretical foundations upon which Non-Canonical Questions builds.

What (#on earth) are the contents of this book?. Part I, ‘Introduction to non-canonical questions’ (pp. 3–48), introduces the reader to concepts of canonicity as it relates to speech acts and to selected influential approaches taken from the vast literature on questions in syntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics. These sections are particularly useful to students or to researchers new to studying interrogatives and question speech acts from the point of view of formal linguistics. Part I also introduces us to three concepts that Trotzke suggests building on in the characterisation of non-canonical questions: bias, epistemicity and speaker emotion. Of these three concepts, the greatest focus in the work to follow is speaker emotion, which feeds into the important defining concept of expressivity in part IV.

In part II, ‘The syntax of non-canonical questions’ (pp. 49–118), the focus is on various deviations from canonicity that express some attitude on the part of the speaker towards the proposition conveyed in the question. Canonicity at a superficial level might be defined language to language, and the main languages discussed in this part, and throughout the book, are German, English and Basque. For the Germanic languages, word-order variation is an important part of forming non-canonical questions, so there is an extended focus on this in terms of wh-in-situ, non‑canonical fronting and non-interrogative word orders, such as declarative questions (e.g. You hate chocolate?!).

Part II also contains a substantial section on German data demonstrating how wh-elements homophonous with argument wh-elements (was, typically meaning ‘what’) deviate in use from the latter canonical forms to mark speakers’ attitudes towards the proposition. This is followed by a third empirical section on the contribution of modal particles to non-canonical questions, here focusing on German and Basque. The reader will, in the course of this part of the monograph, be introduced to Trotzke’s main claim about speech act syntax, namely that most deviations from canonical syntax (and hence canonical question function) can be captured not by postulating speaker- or addressee-related projections in left-peripheral syntax, but by proposing an additional projection, EmphasisP (EmpP), within the clause layer. I will return to the details of this proposal in the discussion of part IV, where EmpP is proposed to be not a language-specific, but rather a language-general projection.

Where part II focuses mainly on syntax, part III (pp. 119–48) examines the pragmatics of non-canonical questions in the context of their use as first (opening) or as second (responding) moves in dialogue. It also provides the reader with further exposure to previous proposals for capturing the content, at issue or otherwise, of various types of questions (and assertions). Here, as in the sections on syntax, Trotzke deviates from longstanding claims in the literature, referencing experimental work that suggests that interrogative clauses used as exclamation acts cannot be answered (only affirmed) and cannot be used as ‘second moves’ in a dialogue, i.e. in response to a question. In doing so, Trotzke demonstrates convincingly, using recent experimental and theoretical work, that non-canonical questions can inhabit a very fluid, contextually flexible place between canonical questions and prototypical exclamatives, for instance English How very tall he is!.

Part IV, titled ‘A new framework for non-canonical questions’ (pp. 149–93), brings together the preceding two parts to present Trotzke’s approach to the interaction between the EmpP-enriched clause and two versions of the notion of expressivity – one that concerns syntactic phenomena whose use is conditioned by context (labelled Expressivity-Narrow, or EN) and the other that encompasses both EN and other expressions of use-conditional expressive meanings, e.g. via phonology (labelled Expressivity-Broad, or EB). Readers familiar with the speech act syntax literature, or those who have recently read chapters from Trotzke & Villalba (Reference Trotzke and Villalba2021), might want to start their reading at part IV, as the core details of the syntactic proposal are repeated here but enriched through the discussion of how Expressivity-Narrow and information structure interact (parts II and III can always be referred to for deeper understanding of the empirical motivation behind the syntactic proposal). This expressive approach to the syntax of non-canonical questions is briefly couched in Bühler’s (Reference Bühler, Goodwin and Eschbach1934) addressee-oriented model of communication, which Trotzke uses to propose that expressivity in syntax is distinct from the contribution of syntax in ‘appealing’ to the addressee when a particular form is uttered in context.

The main takeaway? Expressions of speaker emotion are marked in propositional-level syntax. As mentioned above, Trotzke’s main thesis is that left-peripheral projections scoping over the clause are not required to capture much of the behaviour and form of non-canonical questions such as German why-like-what questions, as in (1) above. Rather, he claims that these forms, the basic underpinning of their interpretation and, potentially, their prosody can be captured by the postulation of a clause-level projection, EmpP, through which wh-items with non-canonical uses transit on their way to a Rizzian left periphery, as illustrated in (5):

By passing through EmpP on their way to check interrogative features on Force, Trotzke claims, wh-elements are marked as expressing emphasis through intensity, whether this intensification of the phrase is marked syntactically or prosodically (in the case of moved items, typically both). Crucially, EmpP and its effects are not exclusive to questions (or any specific clause type or act) but can appear in the full range of clause types, as discussed briefly in part III, where I was exhorted with alarming pertinence to ‘Finish that book, damn it!’ (p. 129). The exact interpretation of emphasis through intensity is, however, a matter for the pragmatic component only.

This proposal is set against recent approaches to speech act syntax that postulate projections above the clause(-typing projection), incorporating aspects of the pragmatic component into the syntax such as information about the interlocutor(s); for instance their knowledge states (e.g. Wiltschko Reference Wiltschko2021 and related work), their contextual features (e.g. Woods Reference Woods2016) or their roles (e.g. Hill Reference Hill2007; Haegeman Reference Haegeman2014). The proposal echoes, however, that of Sigurðsson (Reference Sigurðsson2004), who argues for logophoric heads below Force and Topic but above TP, which interact with discourse but whose effects are squarely in the propositional layer.

The (arguably) more minimal syntax is a strength of the proposal in the sense that it allows for flexibility in the exact interpretation of intensified structures, while still capturing the fixed speaker-oriented nature of the expressed emotion, as well as the clear delimitation of the roles of syntax and pragmatics. This latter point lays down a challenge for more maximal left-peripheral proposals, that must carefully explain why concepts such as speaker intentions, which are highly context dependent, should be part of the syntactic domain at all, and to what extent if so. However, the focus on postulating EmpP means that less time is devoted to explaining exactly what the role of ForceP is, with the result that concepts of clause type and illocutionary force seem, at times, to be conflated, while at others set carefully apart. This is a feature of much writing on the left periphery and is not unique to this monograph, but a clearer exposition of the distinction (or overlap) between clause type and illocutionary force would have been welcome.

Relatedly, the setting of the EmpP proposal against all higher-level discourse-related projections seems to obscure some nuanced observations captured towards the end of part IV, namely that not all non-canonical questions (or utterances) involve the expression of emphasis through intensity, and that other types of interlocutor perspective, particularly addressee perspective, can be expressed via morphosyntactic means. To phrase this differently, the proposal in this monograph and many of the proposals for high left-peripheral speech act syntax proposals do complementary work. This, I feel, is one of the true contributions of the monograph – that it highlights different levels at which speaker perspective can be introduced in the syntax, an observation from which we can build typologies of how speaker perspective is expressed and also make predictions about how different aspects of speaker perspective interact with prosody, pragmatic interpretation and even gesture.

Another clear strength of the work is its careful use of experimental work to support claims made about the use in context of different utterances to inform the line drawn between syntax and pragmatics, which feeds the proposal of clause-level expressive projections. An extension of this work will be to apply the same experimental rigour to claims about the interface between syntax and prosody, in particular to tease apart claims made in parts II and IV about the potential prosodic variation between movement for classical information-structural purposes and movement for expressive purposes. The foundations for some of this work have already been laid – Heim (Reference Heim2019) maps out a Dialogic Speech Act model with the aim of precisely defining how prosodic variation in English conditions the use and interpretation of different clause types, both those with canonical morphosyntactic mapping to specific acts, and those whose syntax is considered to be non-canonical. The very soon-to-appear volume on Biased Questions (Trinh et al. Reference Trinh, Benz, Goodhue, Yatsushiro and Krifkaforthcoming) also ties in issues of intonation and psycholinguistic processing with the concept of bias in questions, which would be interesting to overlay on Trotzke’s proposal, perhaps to tease apart how different types of expressivity emerge in the non-canonical questions he examines.

And so, fortunately for all the MA students of the future, much remains to be done, and for this, Trotzke’s monograph provides an inspirational springboard. Of particular urgency are the need to expand our domain or research typologically, that is to say, outside Indo-European languages and languages of south-east Asia, and also to expand the empirical landscape by including information and emotion as expressed by co-speech gesture (see Heim et al. Reference Heim, Woods, Busche and Repp2024). These are both critical next steps if we are to provide the fullest possible picture from which we can develop future theories of speech act syntax and typologies of speech acts.