Questions in Discourse

Malte Zimmermann received his doctoral degree in Linguistics from the Universiteit van Amsterdam (2002) and is Professor for Semantics and Grammar Theory at Universität Potsdam. He works and publishes in theoretical and experimental linguistics with a focus on the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. His empirical focus is on Germanic and West African languages (Kwa, Chadic).Klaus von Heusinger, Dr. phil. (1992) and Habilitation (1999) at University of Konstanz, Germany, is Professor in General and German Linguistics at the University of Cologne. He works and publishes in theoretical and comparative linguistics with a focus on referential categories, such as (in)definiteness, specificity, and partitivity, and on Differential Object Marking in Romance and Altaic languages.Edgar Onea received his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (2005). He has worked at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Göttingen. Currently, he is a professor for German Linguistics at the University of Graz. He has published on various topics in formal and experimental pragmatics, the semantics-pragmatics interface, information structure and discourse structure.

• 1 IntroductionMalte Zimmermann, Klaus von Heusinger and Edgar Onea2 Focus, Questions and GivennessDaniel Büring3 The Scalar Particle har’i in Ngamo (West Chadic)Mira Grubic4 Question-Answer Pairs in Sign LanguagesAnnika Herrmann, Sina Proske and Elisabeth Volk5 Inferring Meaning from Indirect Answers to Polar Questions: the Contribution of the Rise-Fall-Rise ContourMarie-Catherine de Marneffe and Judith Tonhauser6 Constructing QUD TreesArndt Riester7 Underneath Rhetorical Relations: the Case of ResultEdgar Onea8 Two Alternatives for Disjunction: an Inquisitive ReconciliationFloris RoelofsenIndex