Chapter published in:
Studies in Figurative Thought and Language
Edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou
[Human Cognitive Processing 56] 2017
► pp. 18–40

Exploiting wh-questions for expressive purposes

| University of Hamburg
This chapter offers a conceptual-pragmatic analysis of the construction Wh-x do you think [ complement clause …], which exhibits the morphosyntactic form of wh-interrogative sentences and may indeed be used with a question meaning, but in many contexts functions as a highly expressive speech act (of e.g. strong disapproval). We argue that the expressive sense (target) of the construction is derivable from the (literal) question meaning (source) via a series of metonymically motivated steps. In terms of Fauconnier’s and Turner’s conceptual integration theory, the expressive target meaning can be regarded as the result of conceptual compression. Notwithstanding, “decompression” is always possible, i.e., despite the high degree of conventionalization of the expressive sense, the literal question reading remains cognitively accessible.
Keywords: conceptual compression, conceptual decompression, conventionalization, metonymically motivated inference, source and target senses
Published online: 26 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.56.01pan
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