Questions in Discourse (Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface)

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 2 Pragmatics collects original research on the role of questions in understanding text structure and discourse pragmatics. The in-depth studies discuss the effects of focus, questions and givenness in unalternative semantics, as well as the role of scalar particles, question-answer pairs and prosody from the perspective of Questions under Discussion. Two contributions compare the discourse-structuring potential of Questions under Discussion and rhetorical relations, whereas another adds a perspective from inquisitive semantics. Some contributions also look at understudied languages. Together, the contributions allow for a better understanding of question-related pragmatic and discourse-semantic phenomena, and they offer new perspectives on the structure of texts and discourses.

Malte Zimmermann received his doctoral degree in Linguistics from the Universiteit van Amsterdam (2002) and is Professor for Semantics and Grammar Theory at Universität Potsdam. He works and publishes in theoretical and experimental linguistics with a focus on the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. His empirical focus is on Germanic and West African languages (Kwa, Chadic).

Klaus von Heusinger, Dr. phil. (1992) and Habilitation (1999) at University of Konstanz, Germany, is Professor in General and German Linguistics at the University of Cologne. He works and publishes in theoretical and comparative linguistics with a focus on referential categories, such as (in)definiteness, specificity, and partitivity, and on Differential Object Marking in Romance and Altaic languages.

Edgar Onea received his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (2005). He has worked at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Göttingen. Currently, he is a professor for German Linguistics at the University of Graz. He has published on various topics in formal and experimental pragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, information structure and discourse structure.