This is not an interrogative: the prosody of “wh-questions” in Hebrew, and the sources of their questioning and rhetorical interpretations

Ozerov Pavel

Abstract

Wh-questions are regarded as a prototypical, nearly universal interrogative construction. Although they can have other functions beside eliciting information, these are considered to be pragmatically special, "rhetorical" usages of the interrogative structure. This study of wh-questions in natural Israeli Hebrew speech demonstrates that taking prosody into account makes this standard view untenable for Hebrew. The analysis of the accentuation of the wh-word and of the final intonation shows that the function of the utterance is compositionally constructed from its basic constituents. The construction is an expression of an open proposition, underspecified with respect to its "prototypical" function. The contribution of the utterance is constructed from the direct marking of a few designated categories, such as interest in gapped information and an appeal to the addressee. In this view, the concepts of "genuine" and different types of "rhetorical" questions break down into different combinations of the basic categories. Moreover, it is the "genuine wh-questions" that exhibit more complex marking and function, compared to structurally more basic "rhetorical wh-questions".