Department Colloquium: Rhetorical questions in Italian: lexical-syntactic marking in monolingual and bilingual elicited productions
Time
Thursday, 9. February 2023
11:45 - 13:15
Location
G 307
Organizer
Department of Linguistics
Speaker:
Maria Francesca Ferin
In this talk, I will explore how rhetorical questions (RhQs) are marked in Italian through lexical and syntactic means (discourse particles, aggressive expressions, information structure, etc.), with an eye on the meaning contribution that each cue provides and how it may lead to a rhetorical interpretation. I will present the results of a production study that elicited the production of RhQs and ISQs in Italian across several populations: monolingual adults, bilingual adults, 6- to 9-year-old monolingual children and bilingual children. For bilingual participants, Italian was the heritage language and German the majority language.
Abstract