CRC 1646

B03: Indirectness in discourse. Interrogatives, implicit meaning and incongruence

B03 investigates how non-literal meaning emerges in indirectness within discourse. We examine indirect speech acts based on interrogatives and indirectness in question-response sequences (e.g. in interviews), adopting a cross-linguistic perspective including German, English and Japanese. Using various empirical sources, such as grammatical descriptions, experiments and corpus studies, we look at how formal syntactic factors (clause types) and the structure of discourse (questions-under-discussion) contribute to indirectness, which mechanisms allow for enrichment of conventional interpretation, and which contexts facilitate or limit such creative interpretation.