Episode 74: Who questions the questions? (Patreon)

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we  can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?),  to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic  effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).

In  this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get  enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from  the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance  move...yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question  mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or intensified. We  also talk about grammatical strategies for forming questions, from the  common (like question particles and tag questions in so many languages),  to the labyrinthine history that brings us English’s very uncommon use  of “do” in questions. Plus: the English-centrically-named wh-word  questions (like who, what, where), why we could maybe call them kw-word  questions instead (at least for Indo-European), and why we don’t need to  stress out as much about asking “open” questions.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Lingthusiasm turns 6 this month! We invite you to celebrate six years of linguistics enthusiasm with us by sharing the show - you can share a link to an episode you liked or just share your  lingthusiasm generally. Most people still find podcasts through word of  mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that they could have a fun  linguistics chat in their ears every month (or eyes, all Lingthusiasm  episodes have transcripts!). If you share Lingthusiasm on social media,  tag us so we can reply, and if you share in private, we won’t know but  you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction - or feel free to tell us about  it on social media if you want to be thanked!

We’re also doing a listener survey for the first time! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re  enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in  the future - and your chance to suggest topics! It’s open until December  15, 2022. And we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few  linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the  results of next year. We might even write up a paper about the survey  one day, so we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for  this survey. Take the survey here!

In this month’s bonus episode we  get enthusiastic about a project that Gretchen did to read one paper  for each of the 103 languages recorded in a recent paper by Evan Kidd  and Rowena Garcia about child language acquisition. We talk about some  of the specific papers that stood out to us, and what Gretchen hoped to  achieve with her reading project.

For links mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/701222097876369408/episode-74-who-questions-the-questions-we-use