The Semantics and Pragmatics of Clausal Question-Answer Pairs in ASL!

A question and its answer are closely related at the discourse level: a (non-rhetorical) question requires an answer and an answer is appropriate only with respect to a question. Still, a question and its answer are associated with two independent objects at the syntactic and semantic level. A question is often realized as a matrix interrogative clause and is commonly assumed to denote a set of propositions (e.g. Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977), while an answer is a declarative clause (or often a smaller constituent) denoting a single proposition. In this paper, we study a construction in American Sign Language (ASL) that superficially resembles a question-answer pair at the discourse level, but exhibits two crucial differences: (i) it is uttered by the very same speaker, and (ii) we argue that it forms a syntactic and semantic unit – a declarative clause – by combining an interrogative clause (the "question") and a declarative clause (the "answer"). We call this construction a Clausal Question-Answer pair (CQA). In Section 2, we introduce CQAs and briefly summarize the arguments in favor of the syntactic and semantic analysis we present in Section 3. In Section 4, we discuss a pragmatic property of CQAs and suggest an account within a larger approach to discourse structuring. In Section 5, we compare CQAs to a construction for which a similar analysis has been suggested, namely specificational pseudoclefts in English (and other languages). Section 6 concludes.