Elsevier

Lingua

Volume 246, October 2020, 102951
Lingua

Hypothetical questions in everyday Italian conversations.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102951Get rights and content

Highlights

  • HQs are used to invite interlocutors to imagine a hypothetical scenario.

  • HQs are used to invite interlocutors to answer one or more questions.

  • HQs linguistic design is complex.

  • HQs convey numerous epistemic stances.

  • The pragmatic functions of HQs are multiple.

Abstract

Simulation is an important cognitive resource involved in many mental processes. In this paper, we focus our attention on hypothetical questions (HQs) which are “communicative tools” used by speakers to encourage the activation of that resource, i.e., to invite their interlocutors to imagine a hypothetical scenario and to answer one or more related questions. While their functions have been broadly investigated in institutional settings, little has been written about such questions regarding everyday talk, and no work has been conducted specifically on the Italian language. This paper aims to fill this gap by analysing the linguistic designs, the epistemic stances conveyed, and the pragmatic functions accomplished by a set of HQs taken from a corpus of ordinary Italian conversations. The analysis reveals that the linguistic design of HQs is complex, in the sense that they can be made up of different types of hypothetical and interrogative components; the epistemic stances conveyed are numerous, in the sense that their hypothetical and interrogative components can come from different epistemic positions; and unlike HQs used in institutional settings, their pragmatic functions are multiple, ranging from finding out the interlocutor's opinion, communicating rhetorically the questioners’ point of view, asking for advice, asking for permission, making proposals.

Introduction

Hypothetical (or conditional) questions (HQs) are those questions which are usually made up of two parts1: a hypothetical scenario (if you were me) plus a question component (what would you do?)2; while the former is normally declarative, the latter is interrogative. Generally, the hypothetical scenario precedes the interrogative component (If you were me, what would you do?), although sometimes they are reversed (What would you do, if you were me?).

Studying such questions means investigating a “communicative tool” frequently used by speakers – both in professional communication and in ordinary conversations – which encourages the interlocutors to imagine hypothetical scenarios, situated in the future or in the past, and invites them to answer one or more related questions. The mental processes that allow the interlocutors to imagine such scenarios are known in psychology as simulation heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973, Kahneman and Tversky, 1981).

People's ability to mentally anticipate an event or to imagine it differently from how it actually took place (i.e., to create alternative scenarios), to prefigure one's own and others’ behaviour in given circumstances, or to answer questions involving counterfactual propositions, is a powerful cognitive resource that is involved in numerous mental processes including planning, problem solving, and decision making. The different ways in which people construct different simulations of the same event can affect the way in which it is perceived, evaluated and/or addressed (Raune et al., 2005).

In this study, we present the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a set of HQs extracted from a corpus of Italian ordinary conversations, with the main aims to identify and quantify their linguistic designs, pragmatic functions and epistemic stances. Regarding the identification of the epistemic stances conveyed by the speakers, we applied the Knowing, Unknowing and Believing (KUB) model (Zuczkowski et al., 2017, Bongelli et al., 2018, Bongelli et al., 2020, Riccioni et al., 2018).

Previous conversational research on HQs has largely been carried out in institutional contexts, specifically in medical and social fields. In particular, the following contexts appear to be favoured in studying this kind of question:

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    counselling and psychotherapeutic sessions, such as those on the future of HIV and AIDS patients (see the pioneering research by Silverman and Peräkylä, 1990, Peräkylä, 1993, Peräkylä, 1995, Miller and Silverman, 1995), or on difficult decisions regarding testing, i.e., on benefits of doing or of avoiding genetic tests during genetic counselling meetings (Sarangi and Clarke, 2002a, Sarangi and Clarke, 2002b, Sarangi, 2010), or on uncomfortable discussions about weight with obese patients (Armstrong et al., 2018);

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    psychiatric consultations, such as those on clinical assessment for gender/sex reassignment surgery for transsexual patients (Speer and Parson, 2006, Speer, 2010, Speer, 2012, Speer, 2013);

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    medical communications, such as those on breaking bad news to patients with cancer (Luftey and Maynard, 1998, Pino et al., 2016, Land et al., 2018, Cornelissen et al., 2018) or heart disease (Ahluwalia et al., 2013);

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    social interviews, such as those between social workers and prospective adoptive parents to assess their suitability (Noordegraaf et al., 2008a, Noordegraaf et al., 2008b, Noordegraaf et al., 2009, Noordegraaf et al., 2010).

In these settings, HQs are primarily used by the expert (counsellor, psychotherapist, psychiatrist, oncologist, social worker, etc.) in order to induce the interlocutor (lay-person, patient, client, etc.) to imagine a hypothetical scenario, generally placed in the future, and negatively denoted, i.e., a scenario whose outcomes are envisaged as adverse and/or undesirable, for example pain, unsatisfying sexual life after gender reassignment surgery, events that are in contrast with the interlocutors’ ideas, expectations or plans, dying, death, and so on. By using HQs, the expert normally aims to encourage the interlocutors to engage with difficult issues (Parry et al., 2014); to provide them with an opportunity to talk about their fears for the future, their worries, distress, and anxiety, and to help them to manage such feelings and/or to make important decisions (Land et al., 2018); as well as to discuss their expectations and preferences (Ahluwalia et al., 2013, Cornelissen et al., 2018, Land et al., 2018). Furthermore, on occasion, the experts use HQs to evaluate the interlocutors’ abilities to cope with possible problematic events (e.g., Speer, 2012, Speer, 2013), and, consequently, to formulate judgments regarding important issues, for instance approving or denying surgery, or giving a favourable or unfavourable judgement for an adoption.

However, even though HQs are mainly used by the expert in addressing the interlocutor, in some cases it is the interlocutor who poses them to the expert. For example, in the context of critical care, patients’ surrogates frequently ask the doctor questions like What if she was your mother? According to Bibler and Miller (2019), in asking these questions, the surrogates can signal that they want to (1) obtain a recommendation regarding a specific medical decision, (2) share the responsibility of being a decision-maker, or simply (3) communicate their emotional states.3 In oncological contexts too, patients frequently resort to HQs to find out more about their life expectancy: If I go on the treatment, I might live a bit longer, will I? (Rodriguez et al., 2007, p. 158). In psychiatric contexts, the HQs are sometimes used by patients to express criticism and to challenge the psychiatrist's perspective on their treatments If I was to go out this door now and throw myself off a bridge, <.hh wouldn’t that be your responsibility. For not giving me what I wanted (Speer, 2012, p. 369).

The numerous studies on HQs in institutional settings, mainly in English-speaking environments, seem to have had the main aim of identifying the particular functions performed by these questions within specific contexts of use. Speer (2012) was the first to collect and analyze American and British examples of HQs (exclusively in the form of hypothetical scenario + yes/no questions) taken from 4 different contexts: ordinary conversations, research interactions, news interviews and doctor–patient interactions. Her aim was to ascertain “whether and to what extent, they represent a generic or context-free conversational device that operates in a similar way across contexts” (Speer, 2012, p. 370). She found that, irrespective of the context, these questions are placed in similar sequential environments, are designed to expand rather than initiate courses of action, and invite the recipients “to reconsider their view in light of the contingency” they raise. In addition to these commonalities, she also identified setting-specific variations. Specifically, as far as ordinary conversations are concerned, HQs would be used mainly “to help recipients to clarify their point of view or to persuade them to change their view”, therefore to encourage them “to move from a position of uncertainty towards one of certainty, or vice versa”4 (Speer, 2012, p. 370).

Section snippets

Aims

Although HQs have been widely investigated in institutional contexts, little has been written about their uses and pragmatic functions in everyday talk, and to our knowledge no previous study has addressed them from the point of view of the Italian language. In order to address this gap, we present the quantitative and qualitative analysis of a set of HQs extracted from a corpus of ordinary Italian conversations. We investigate a variety of HQ linguistic designs, expanding Speer's (2012)

Corpus

Our corpus comprises 79 instances of hypothetical questions extracted from 56 different everyday conversations involving relatives, siblings, friends, and couples involved in different conversational activities (talking about personal problems, telling stories, planning events, quarrelling, etc.). These conversations are part of a larger corpus of 142 face to face Italian conversations recorded in informal (typically domestic) settings and transcribed according to a simplified version of the

Results

As noted in Section 1, HQs comprise two parts: a declarative hypothetical scenario plus an interrogative component.

The hypothetical component, which outlines the hypothetical scenario, can be explicitly or implicitly expressed, i.e., it can be absent. In such cases, it can be inferred from the context. For example, in the case of a question such as the one in Example (1):

(1)Tu dove andresti? / Where would you go?8

Discussion

As far as we know, the present study is the first to investigate the variety of epistemic stances and pragmatic functions accomplished by HQs in ordinary Italian conversations. It is not an easy task to compare the findings with those of e.g. Speer (2012), who was the first to analyze a corpus of ordinary conversations: first of all because she focused on American and British data, which does not always permit neat correspondences with other languages; secondly, because her corpus was very

Conclusion

Simulation is an important cognitive resource for human beings and is involved in numerous mental processes, such as decision making or problem solving. It can be activated by HQs both in institutional and ordinary contexts: questioners usually use HQs both to try to encourage their interlocutors to envisage a situation (past or future), and to answer one or more related questions by imaging what could happen (in the future) or what could have happened (in the past).

While functions associated

Permission

All the speakers gave their consent for using the audiotaped conversations for research and publication purposes.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Submission declaration

The present paper has not been published previously, it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere and, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically without the written consent of the copyright-holder. It is approved by all authors.

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Bongelli Ramona, Ph.D. in Psychology of Communication, is an assistant professor in General Psychology at the University of Macerata (Italy), Department of Political Science, Communication and International Relations, where she teaches Psychology of language and communication. Her main scientific and research interests concern the pragma-linguistic and epistemic aspects of communication. She authored and co-authored books, books chapters, and peer-reviewed research articles in international

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  • Bongelli Ramona, Ph.D. in Psychology of Communication, is an assistant professor in General Psychology at the University of Macerata (Italy), Department of Political Science, Communication and International Relations, where she teaches Psychology of language and communication. Her main scientific and research interests concern the pragma-linguistic and epistemic aspects of communication. She authored and co-authored books, books chapters, and peer-reviewed research articles in international journals.

    Riccioni Ilaria, Ph.D. in Education, is an assistant professor in General Psychology at the University of Macerata (Italy), Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism. She is Director of the Research Centre for Psychology of Communication and Text Semiotics “J.S. Pet

    fi”. Her main scientific and research interests concern the pragma-linguistic and relational dimensions of talk in interaction. She authored or co-authored several books, peer-reviewed articles in international journals and book chapters.

    Fermani Alessandra, Ph.D. in Social Psychology. In 2005 she became researcher in Social Psychology and in 2015 she was Associate professor in Social Psychology (Department of Educational Sciences, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata-Italy). She has the coordination of the Ph.D. in Psychology, Communication and Social Sciences. In the last years, she has worked on various international research projects about identity formation in different ethnic groups and on sustainable tourism. Her works have been published in several books and international journals. She is referee and editorial board member of international journals.

    Philip Gill, Ph-D in Corpus Linguistics, is an associate professor in English language in the Department of Humanities, University of Macerata, where she teaches modules in English linguistics, Italian-English translation, and language teaching methodologies. Her research interests centre on the convergence of cognition and linguistic communication, with a particular emphasis on figurative language. She is author of Colouring Meaning (Benjamins, 2011) and numerous articles and book chapters on corpus linguistics, phraseology, and metaphor.

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