|
Who likes bananas? The acquisition of rhetorical questions in bilingual children| title | Who likes bananas? The acquisition of rhetorical questions in bilingual children |
|---|
| start_date | 2024/04/15 |
|---|
| schedule | 12h15 |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| location_info | Pinchat 22, room 003 |
|---|
| summary | Rhetorical questions (RQs) are syntactically interrogatives that have the pragmatic function of an assertion that is used to signal the speaker’s attitude, as illustrated in (1) below.
(1) Who wants to pay taxes?
In example (1) world knowledge indicates that the speaker is not trying to elicit information, i.e., this is not an information-seeking question (ISQ). World knowledge is not the only cue listeners can use to disambiguate between RQs from ISQs. In German, RQs and ISQs can be disambiguated through lexical-syntactic cues, such as discourse particles (DiPs; Bayer & Struckmeier, 2017; Biezma & Rawlins, 2017) as well as through phonetic (e.g., duration, voice quality) and phonological (e.g., pitch accent, boundary tone) cues (Braun et al., 2019). Example (2) illustrates a question that is ambiguous and can be interpreted either as an ISQ or an RQ. Example (3) shows that the use of the DiPs ‘denn; and ‘schon’ combined provides a strong disambiguating cue for an RQ interpretation.
(2) Wer mag Bananen? - RQ or ISQ interpretation
Who likes bananas?
(3) Wer mag denn schon Bananen? - Only RQ interpretation
Who likes DiP DiP bananas?
To date only very few studies have addressed how children acquire RQs and what cues they use to disambiguate a RQ from an ISQ. In this talk I will present results from our project (T. Kupisch, T. Marinis, M. Ferin, M. Geiss: ‘Non-Canonical Questions in Early and Late Bilingual Language Acquisition’) investigating how bilingual children acquire RQs in German as a majority language and Italian as a heritage language. The presentation will focus on early bilingual children growing up in Germany and will address what cues they use when they interpret and produce German and Italian questions. Are they able to use lexical-syntactic, phonetic and phonological cues equally well in both languages? Are there differences between their heritage and majority language? Are there instances of cross-linguistic influence and what role does the input play in the acquisition of RhQs? |
|---|
| responsibles | Hadjadj |
|---|
Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
|---|
| submitted | published | | 2024/04/04 13:51 UTC |
| |
|