Non-canonical questions, which convey the speaker’s epistemic or emotional states, as opposed to canonical questions, which request information from the addressee, have been investigated from different perspectives and through interfaces between different modules of grammar. In this monograph, non-canonical questions are studied from the perspective of the syntax–pragmatics interface and a simplified interface hypothesis is proposed.

This monograph contains four parts. Part I, “Introduction to non-canonical questions,” comprised of Chapters 1–3, introduces background information about the analysis of non-canonical questions at the syntax–pragmatics interface and proposes a typology of non-canonical questions. Non-canonical questions can be classified according to three notions: the speaker’s bias, epistemic states, and the speaker’s emotion. The speaker’s bias is illustrated in (1) and (2). The negative polar question in (1) expresses the speaker’s belief in the lateness of starting a new project and seeks the addressee’s confirmation of the same belief. The English tag question in (2) conveys the speaker’s belief in tomorrow’s weather conditions, also with the function of seeking confirmation.

Epistemic states are the speaker’s degree of certainty about the truth of a proposition, which can be extremely low or high. The former can be represented by the can’t-find-the-value question in (3), and the latter can be represented by the rhetorical question in (4).

The last kind of non-canonical question that conveys the speaker’s emotion can be represented by the wh-the-hell question in (5). This kind of non-canonical question conveys the speaker’s negative emotion like astonishment, discontent, or anger.

Part II, “The syntax of non-canonical questions,” including Chapters 4–6, investigates syntactic triggers of non-canonical interpretations of questions. The first kind of syntactic trigger examined in this part is word order. It is argued that the special interpretation of wh-in situ questions in English is not due to covert syntactic movement, but is related to the non-standard prosody. Another type of non-canonical question, declarative questions, is also analyzed as having interrogative interpretations on account of the interaction between syntax and prosody, rather than covert syntactic operations. But non-canonical fronting of question particles in German is indeed argued to require a dedicated syntactic movement since its interpretation is different from that of the questions with the particle in situ in exhibiting an emphasis effect. Realized in the syntactic derivation, the particle in this kind of non-canonical question is proposed to move to the specifier of EmpP (Emphasis Phrase) before finally moving to the specifier of ForceP.

The second kind of syntactic trigger is the wh-element. First of all, why-like-what elements are discussed, taking was “what” in (6) as an example.

This kind of sentence is non-canonical since it conveys the speaker’s emotion, such as astonishment, rather than seeking information. Trotzke assumes that why-like-what elements that express surprise should be accounted for by postulating a functional projection below illocutionary force instead of locating it above Force, as proposed in Chapter 4. Since the exclamatory readings can be found across illocutionary forces, there is no need to propose an additional functional projection.

Besides why-like-what elements, wh-elements with extreme degree readings (e.g. How cool is that?) and how come questions (e.g. How come you didn’t call me last night?) are non-canonical questions expressing the speaker’s surprise as well, thus the same syntactic architecture proposed in Chapter 4 is adopted, as shown in (7).

The last kind of syntactic trigger discussed in this monograph is modal particles in non-canonical questions. Modal particles, separate from closely related elements such as sentence adverbs or modal adverbs, are shown to have their own unique syntactic distribution. Modal particles in German, transforming basic information-seeking questions into non-canonical questions, are argued to be located clause-internally, while languages such as Romanian have their base position for modal particles in the left periphery of the clause. Based on the study of modal particles in Basque, Trotzke demonstrates a cross-linguistic syntax for modal particles in questions. The modal particle ote in Basque wh-questions, no matter whether it moves or not, is always adjacent to the inflected form of the verb. It is thus proposed that the phrasal projection hosting the modal particle ote is adjacent to the TP-domain, corresponding to the syntactic position of modal particles in German. The modal particle -a in polar questions in Basque eastern dialects is argued to involve a functional position outside the TP-zone, thereby in accord with the modal particles in Romanian.

The third part of this monograph, incorporating Chapters 7 and 8, probes into the pragmatics of non-canonical questions and examines the extent to which the pragmatic behavior of non-canonical questions is reflected in the syntax. In Chapter 7, surprise-disapproval questions (e.g. questions containing why-like-what elements) are explored. It is indicated in Trotzke’s previous experimental study that surprise-disapproval questions as the first utterance in a dialogue are judged by participants as having pragmatic functions of both requesting information and affirmation. It is thus concluded that surprise-disapproval questions are non-canonical speech acts at the level of pragmatics. Exhibiting properties of both information-seeking questions and exclamatives, surprise-disapproval questions are proposed to be syntactically represented as a similar case to questions containing wh-elements with extreme degree readings in Chapter 5. Chapter 8 further explores non-canonical questions as second moves, the response to the first utterance in a dialogue. It is maintained that not only rhetorical questions but also expressive questions, such as surprise-disapproval questions, can be used as responses to an information-seeking question as long as they can match with the first move at the level of information structure. The expressive question in (8a) cannot be used as a response to the narrow-focus question in (8a). But in (8b), the same expressive question becomes a perfect response to the broad-focus wh-question.

The last part, “A new framework for non-canonical questions,” involving Chapters 9 and 10, provides a general conceptual framework incorporating the syntactic analyses proposed in the previous chapters. It is demonstrated that large parts of what is commonly known as the field of information structure can be reconceptualized as the study of expressivity in language. It is thus quite natural that expressivity in questions is analyzed by using a functional domain below ForceP traditionally available in the cartographic approach to information-structural phenomena. Additionally, it is shown that the separation of Expressivity and Force corresponds nicely to the separation of the two fundamental communicative functions “expression” and “appeal” in the famous model of communication proposed by Bühler (Reference Bühler and Goodwin1934 [2011]).

Broadly speaking, this monograph makes an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of cross-linguistic non-canonical questions from the perspective of the syntax–pragmatics interface. Much research on non-canonical questions is conducted from the perspective of phonology or semantics (Celle & Pelissier Reference Celle and Pelissier2024; Kiss Reference Kiss2024). This monograph provides a different perspective and enables us to understand non-canonical questions more deeply and comprehensively. The hypothesis proposed in this monograph simplifies the syntactic analysis of non-canonical questions of previous approaches and covers more unnoticed data. It is proposed that many of the non-canonical readings of questions can be reduced to more primitive discourse notions, which are relevant for many other linguistic phenomena. It is emphasized that the pragmatic level of interpretation of non-canonical questions is deeply rooted in the syntax of sentences, contrary to the assumption that pragmatic meanings can only be determined by a concrete context. This kind of in-depth investigation into the interactions between the syntactic and pragmatic components can help to better understand the internal structure of the faculty of language and may shed some light on the connections between language and cognitive systems.

Speaking of the theoretical innovation, this monograph challenges the current analysis of the syntactic position of functional projections related to non-canonical readings of questions. Munaro and Obenauer (Reference Munaro and Obenauer1999) and their followers distinguish non-canonical questions from both information-seeking questions and exclamations at the speech act level and propose different CP configurations for different clause types. Trotzke, however, maintains that regardless of clause type, an EmpP is always present below ForceP in the syntactic configuration. Theoretically, this unifies and simplifies the syntactic representation of different clause types. However, to argue that there is an EmpP below ForceP, overt syntactic movement should be demonstrated to show that such a functional projection indeed exists. So far, none of the examples discussed in this monograph provides explicit evidence of overt movement to such a position.

As for its empirical explanatory power, the proposal of the functional category EmpP located between CP and TP in this monograph is used to explain cross-linguistic data from languages such as German, English, Italian, and Basque. Woods et al. (Reference Woods, Klok and Heim2024) point out that there exists a possibility that this proposal for EmpP can be further applied in Javanese. But Pan (Reference Pan2019) argues that sentence-final particles related to the speaker’s subjective opinion, mood, and attitude in Chinese are located in a functional projection labelled Att(itude)P in the highest C projection. If particles related to the speaker’s attitude are interpreted under the scope of an illocutionary force particle, such as the interrogative particle, the speaker’s attitude is also questioned, which gives rise to an incorrect interpretation. Clearly, it still remains to be examined whether the proposal can be extended to more natural languages.