Just-asking questions

Abstract

While the ‘canonical’ function of questions—utterances of interrogative clauses—is to solicit answers, this is not a definitive property of questions, since some varieties have an interrogative form but a non-inquisitive function, such as rhetorical questions. I examine a new type of such questions in English which I dub controversy questions, whose answer is unknown to conversational participants but nevertheless steers the discourse towards answering them. I propose that such questions motivated a bleached pragmatics for question asking: they set a conversational agenda of exploring a Question Under Discussion (Roberts 1996/2012) and nothing further. I show that this view can derive a range of attested possible discourse effects of questions given independent features of contexts of utterance. Moreover, I argue that this perspective also explains how question-asking can be weaponized as a rhetorical strategy to sow doubt under the guise of ‘just asking questions’ in contexts like newspaper headlines.