Between rhetorical questions and information requests: A versatile interrogative clause in Estonian

1 Introduction

This article investigates a non-canonical interrogative sentence type in Estonian, composed of the adjective huvitav (‘interesting’) followed by an interrogative clause (polar or wh-question). These clauses seem to share properties with a number of interrogative clauses: classic rhetorical questions, self-addressed questions, non-intrusive questions (Farkas 2022), but also information requests. Estonian syntax describes them as indirect interrogatives functioning as complements, where a subject clause is subordinated to an elliptical main clause (Erelt 2017, 684–7).

These clauses are said to come always as a reaction to previous information and are formed either as interrogative or assertive clauses (Erelt 2017, 687). Based on interactional data, Keevallik (2011, 62) has argued that instead of considering these constructions as typical subordinate clauses, they could be seen as independent clauses preceded by an epistemic device. In her data, these clauses are always treated as questions by the speakers.

From a formal and pragmatic point of view, they seem to constitute a clear pattern in written as well as in oral language use. In an interactional perspective, Keevallik (2011) has analyzed these items along with a series of other complement-taking-predicates or complement interrogatives, bringing into question the status of the so-called main clause. Complementation has been investigated in recent works about a variety of languages (about English, see Thompson 2002; about Estonian, see Keevallik 2008; about Finnish, see Laury 2006). In consequence, the traditional understanding of subordination has been challenged in many approaches, based on data from real-time interactions.

Building on the abovementioned works on subordination and epistemic question patterns, this construction is not analyzed here in the traditional syntactic framework, but instead, as a routinized question pattern where the “matrix clause” does not appear as an assertion containing an evaluative adjective, but functions instead as a marker of a certain clause type, taking an epistemic function that plays a primary role in the interpretation of the utterance (Heritage 2012).

Something else is indeed done by asking this question: it is not an acknowledging of a fact that something is interesting for the speaker; and it also entails something more than asking a question meaning “I would like to know”: while requesting information is not completely ruled out in the use of this question, there is always another effect or a secondary meaning that can be identified, besides asking for information. This interrogative also gives rise to questions about the subjectivity and intersubjectivity and their interrelation, as some of its occurrences seem mainly intended to convey the attitude or the assessment of the speaker, while most of them are clearly intersubjective by nature.

Our aim is thus to discover the various functions of huvitav-prefaced questions based on selected instances from three discourse types (fiction texts, plenary debates of the Estonian Parliament [EstParl], and spoken interaction) and to define, where possible, their general characteristics (common to all uses) and show how they are used to convey specific meanings or effects, depending on the discourse type or other parameters. Contrastive analysis of Estonian–French fiction texts and their translations is used to specify the functions of this clause in Estonian as they appear in written texts.

2 Method and data

The approach chosen here is a form-to-function approach: the aim of this analysis is to explore the variety of functions of these constructions as they appear in the language and not to part from pre-determined classes of functions that have already been described for different types of questions. Essential principles from conversation analysis are applied when analyzing the conversational data, particularly the data-driven approach and the assumption that human communication takes place as a sequentially organized interaction where a turn is built on the prior turn, interpreted in real time by the speaker who reveals his or her understanding in a subsequent turn.

The study is qualitative, although some quantitative data are presented, but the corpus is not sufficiently balanced to allow reliable comparisons between different registers or language uses. The corpus chosen for the study nevertheless reflects preconceived assumptions about the kind of data that were expected to be found and that were considered as having a specific interest for the matter at hand: first, considering that there is no unique counterpart in French for this resource, examples from an Estonian–French bilingual corpus (70 tokens) are analyzed to shed light on how this clause is translated into French or which French constructions are translated into Estonian by huvitav-prefaced clauses. The corpus search was done in the Estonian and French fiction texts of the parallel corpus of the Estonian–French Association of Lexicography (http://corpus.estfra.ee), which consists of 7.94 millions of words (abbreviated here as CoPEF), using the keyword huvitav; among the results (348 tokens), all the sentences containing the target construction were selected.

The idea of using written examples assumes that, due to the lack of other clues for interpretation such as intonation, gestures, and other aspects of speech that unfold in real time, recurrent translations should reflect stabilized functions of this device. The analysis can reveal possible stylistic, connotational, and other features of the resource that are less present or less prominent in everyday conversations and, inversely, the written text, by the impossibility of repairs and ulterior disambiguation, assumedly relays established uses.

The second corpus is composed of the transcripts of political speeches and discussions from the plenary sittings of the EstParl (70 tokens). This resource is available on the website of the EstParl (https://stenogrammid.riigikogu.ee/). Based on the amount of examples found in the first corpus, 70 examples were drawn from 2017 to 2022. This text collection was chosen for two reasons: first, it is originally spoken text with some specific restrictions: time, absence of direct recipient (this is not a rule, for example during the question and answer sessions with a minister [MIN]), a need to convey a political message rather than discuss the content of a specific matter; and second, a quick search in this corpus showed that the specific context of political speeches favors the use of biased questions such as the ones with reversed polarity or conveying criticism by different means, including by huvitav questions. All excerpts are also checked against the original video recording. The third, rather limited, corpus (12 tokens), composed of sample informal conversations drawn from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu (SpCorpus; 12 h of recordings), provides examples of how these questions are treated in interaction but considering that examples from oral language have also been investigated by Keevallik (2011), they received less attention in the present analysis than the examples from the other corpora. All examples that were found using the search words huvitav and uvitav (spoken variant) were included in this data set. One example comes from the web search engine.

When analyzing conversational data, it is common to observe the recipients’ type of answer or reaction to determine whether the utterance in question is a question or not. In my examples of oral speech, this criterion could not be used for the examples of political speech. Whereas there are sequences of questions and answers predetermined by the nature of the sessions (e.g., questions to the government) during which the MIN is expected to answer the members, in many cases the construction investigated here does not necessarily occur during these sessions but in plenary speeches, and in general, the questions come rarely alone, but rather in groups or clusters. The addressee can therefore pick some of them to answer while setting others aside. It is nevertheless interesting to observe which questions are chosen and answered, because some of them are clearly rhetorical by nature and can be used by the speaker to design her answer in different ways, depending on how she decides to treat the question. For example, in political discourse, the assertion conveyed in the rhetorical question may be opposed in terms of truth value without directly answering the question, but the addressee also has the possibility to answer a rhetorically or ironically designed question by ignoring its biased nature and treat it as an information request.

3 Form and function

4 Huvitav interrogatives as a subjective device

Some interrogative clauses introduced by huvitav do not expect an answer because the question is self-addressed or presented as a contemplative questioning in which the speaker does not address anyone in particular in the communication situation. Although some authors have argued that intersubjectivity can virtually never be ruled out in human communication, even in self-talk (Du Bois 2011), these examples are discussed here as subjective devices separately from those where the addressees have, in principle, the chance to answer or react.

Besides Traugott (2003), we follow here the accounts of Benveniste (1966) and Lyons (1982) about subjectivity and intersubjectivity, considering that the subjective dimension is involved in all cases when the speakers refer to their cognitive processes using linguistic means to make an assessment or to express an attitude. Subjectivity is thus defined by the absence of the expression of intersubjectivity, whereby the speaker or writer pays attention

to the “self” of the addressee/reader in both an epistemic sense (paying attention to their presumed attitudes to the content of what is said), and in a more social sense (paying attention to their “face” or “image needs” associated with social stance and identity). (Traugott 2003, 128)

In this framework, less attention is paid to the relation between (inter)subjectivity and mutual knowledge of the participants (Verhagen 2005, Nuyts 2001) or markers of mutual understanding as is the rule in conversation analysis. In order for the definitions of these concepts to work on the real data presented in this article, Traugott’s approach seemed the most appropriate; she has also established that the mere presence of the addressee/reader in the described situation does not mean that intersubjectivity is involved, but the addressee/reader has to be a participant in the speech event (Traugott 2003, 129), which means that it does not include, for example, cases in which only some second person reference is mentioned: there has to be a trace of the relationship between the participants. However, the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity do not have clear boundaries and exact linguistic counterparts, but are rather gradient notion continuum where different linguistic expressions are involved (De Cock 2015, 5–6). Considering that, it also seems plausible to support the view that subjectivity is generally inherent in intersubjectivity and that these phenomena are often both present, but depending on the focus (addresser/addressee), it is possible to distinguish between the two.

My data reveal that many examples of subjective use can be found in written language, but huvitav clauses as self-talk occur in embedded clauses in written as well as in oral language, in all discourse types. In fiction texts, the interrogative introduced by huvitav occurs most often in the inner speech of the narrator. Most occurrences display narrators “talking” to themselves, but based on the specific design of these interrogatives and their general context of occurrence in a fiction text with the possibility of having insight into the ideas of the narrator, one can assume that they somehow still involve the reader in their quest for an answer or in the questioning set out in the utterance, thus inviting the reader to speculate.

The subjective dimension of this question pattern is revealed in examples from the bilingual corpus: the reflexive verb se demander ‘to ask oneself’ is the most frequent counterpart in French; the written register is certainly a factor that favors the subjective interpretation of the pattern in cases where it does not occur in a dialogue. In example (4), a fiction text translated from Estonian into French, the narrator asks a putative question, making a guess about how the readers would feel if he were to continue by inserting a monologue in his text. Undoubtedly, the general addressee of a book are its readers, but in a first-person narration, the question asked by the narrator is interpreted as being addressed to himself, although some ambiguity is maintained in this utterance.

To translate the huvitav question into French, the reflective construction je me demande ‘I ask myself, I wonder’ is used, and the subjective dimension is explicitly marked here in terms of grammar. The subordinated sentence in French is formed as an indirect question (an assertion). A distinction is to be made between a syntactically formed interrogative construction (formal property) and a question in terms of its illocutionary force, as a speech act (functional property) that can be also formulated as an assertion. Je me demande in French is an example of the latter (Therkelsen 2009, 115).

Huvitav clauses that undoubtedly are questions in terms of their illocutionary force (a speaker who lacks some knowledge asks a question of an addressee who may be able to provide an answer) bear a marking (the adjective huvitav) that rules out their interpretation as simple requests for information. It has been shown that, in Estonian conversation, they are always treated as questions and never as plain assessments (Keevallik 2011). Other examples from different corpora expand our understanding of this device, supported by cases in which the answer is not possible or expected for different reasons, but the act of questioning remains nevertheless present, whereas other meanings come in addition to the propositional content of the utterance.

This distinction has to do with the typology of questions suggested by Lyons (1977, 755), who draws a distinction between asking a question of someone and simply posing the question without any particular addressee. For the cases discussed here, this can cover examples in written texts where the addressee can be, on the one hand, a virtual person (the character) or a virtual group (the reader(s) and/or the character) and has in either case a very limited freedom of action, at the discretion of the author. On the other hand, in public speech, as we will see below, more factors come into play, and the versatility and ambiguity of this device allow its use with various secondary effects.

In the bilingual corpus, the usual counterpart of the huvitav question is indeed the verb se demander ‘to ask oneself’, which is used when the narrator refers to his/her thinking process, whereas in direct speech sequences the question appears often in French as a simple, unsubordinated sentence (but this also happens in inner speech, as in next example (5), where the context indicates clearly who the person is who is asking the question). The next example, a translation from French into Estonian, is a good illustration of the potential of this construction in terms of subjectivity and shows its functioning beyond one sentence and thereby its involvement in the construction of larger segments.

In this sequence, the main character of the story is described as thinking about Philibert (Elle pensait à Philibert ‘she thought about Philibert’). In French, this action is depicted using the verb in the imperfect; this tense refers to a lasting activity without a precise beginning or ending (Riegel et al. 1999, 305–6). There is no specific counterpart in Estonian to the expression of this aspect of action in the past tenses, and the first sentence does not give any clues about the duration or any other characterization of the activity. In the translation, however, the use of huvitav in the next sentence seems to convey the adequate aspectual nuance obtained by the combination of both sentences in French, as huvitav adds this contemplative nuance to the description, which makes it possible to characterize the action and its duration: it indeed involves the possibility for the character to imagine different things Philibert could be doing at that moment.

Here we can also see the constraint that affects the introduction of new information, as described by Lambrecht and known as the principle of separation of reference and role: in order to say something about a topic, it needs to be introduced previously in the discourse (Lambrecht 1994). The huvitav clause appears as a device used for topic continuity after the introduction of a topic, and several topic continuity markers can indeed be found in these utterances, such as demonstratives or pronouns echoing or referring to some immediately preceding element. This clause is thus used for discourse structuring purposes, and it contributes to the elaboration of an already introduced topic.

The question introduced by huvitav seems to have common properties with questions introduced by vajon in Hungarian (Gärtner and Gyuris 2007, 2009) or oare in Romanian (Farkas 2022), both corresponding approximately to ‘I wonder’, where the use of these markers in a question as a consequence suspends the request by the speaker for an answer from the addressee. As a result, these questions cannot be asked in cases where the addressee is clearly in a position to resolve the issue raised in the question and is asked to do so directly, for example, when a patient goes to the doctor who, in order to make a diagnosis, first inquires about the symptoms the patient is experiencing (example 6):

Returning to the translations, from Estonian into French in the following two instances, we notice that the epistemic dimension of this device is clearly present, with adverbs and clauses such as il serait intéressant de savoir ‘it would be interesting to know’ (example 7). This sentence was also translated using peut-être ‘maybe’, était-ce parce que ‘was it because’, and on aimerait savoir ‘we would like to know’, through which the speaker’s position on the epistemic scale goes from uncertain knowing to not knowing something.

A mirative meaning or an attempt to find an explanation is present in constructions such as c’est curieux ‘it is strange’. Here (example 8), the question refers to a situation that is contrary to the narrator’s expectations.

Huvitav clauses also appear in different embedded constructions, combined with verbs of thinking or asking by which the process of thinking or wondering of the speaker/narrator is made explicit in a separate clause. In these cases, the questions do not expect an answer – they are used as part of the argumentation or the description of a train of thought.

In example (9), the prime minister, while answering questions from members of parliament (MPs), makes a comment about how he tried to guess the content of the question addressed to him, based on its subject, which was told to him in advance. He refers to the process of thinking siis ma mõtlesin ‘then I thought’, and the embedded huvitav question is linked to the preceding clause by the complementizer et. (Here and in all examples of political speech, the original transcription has been maintained.)

The topic promoted in the first part of the utterance, koalitsioonileping ‘coalition agreement’, is referred to in the indirect question with the demonstrative adverb sealt ‘from there’. The question is framed by a descriptive clause, siis ma mõtlesin ‘then I thought’. In the next utterance, the speaker indeed answers himself by reporting his conjectural conclusions, based on the immediately preceding discussion.

Most examples of subject-centered uses do introduce a true questioning of the speaker/narrator who does not know the answer; it makes it possible to ask or to wonder about the immediately preceding element, but also to introduce a parenthetical or a digression from the main narration (example 7). The common features of these questions are that the possible addressees are not able to answer or the utterance is designed such that they cannot do so.

5 Huvitav interrogatives as an intersubjective device

Besides the cases where the subjective (as opposed to the intersubjective) dimension is clearly discernable, huvitav clauses are mostly used as an intersubjective device – that is, obviously manifesting the relation to the recipient.

6 Discussion and conclusion

As part of the resource investigated here, the adjective huvitav does not appear in its usual function in discourse as an adjective: instead of conveying an assessment about some observable fact or phenomenon like a regular qualifying adjective, it is part of a conventionalized question pattern that contributes to the structuring of the discourse, and is thus a topic-continuing and a projective device. It does not state that the upcoming question is “of interest,” but rather forms a whole construction with specific subjective and intersubjective effects. As a question, it nevertheless always manifests the relation with an addressee that can be the speaker herself, an undetermined or generic recipient, or a determined addressee.

From a pragmatic and semantic point of view, we did not find in our examples any features that could speak in favor of considering them as cases of subordination: the questions were independent with respect to the adjective (as main clause), the literal meaning of the so-called main clause is not easy to determine when analyzed together with the following question and, in consequence, the role of the adjective huvitav emerges only from a pragmatic analysis of the examples. The question initiated by huvitav considered in its previous context and with its secondary effects reveals that the adjective functions rather as an epistemic marker.

The same conclusion was reached by Keevallik (2011) based on examples of interaction.

The examples analyzed in this article were divided in two groups with regard to the prevalence of the subjective or the intersubjective dimension. The specific features and secondary effects described in Section 5 cannot be ruled out in subject-oriented uses, but this choice was made in order to demonstrate the versatility of this device in regard to the relation between the speaker and the addressee(s).

In different corpora, this interrogative pattern appears as part of a series of questions or arguments: they are linked to the ongoing topic that is a prerequisite for using this construction, as has been also pointed out in previous accounts (Keevallik 2011, Erelt 2017). Naturally, the question occurs after quotations or references to others’ ideas or positions; especially in political speech, it is used to disagree with a previously expressed or described position, but the pattern is also regularly used in self-questioning, revealing its subject-oriented role, especially in fiction texts or in embedded clauses in which the speakers refer to their inner thoughts or report another’s speech.

The use of huvitav at the beginning of an interrogative utterance (but not exclusively) generally signals two things: first, that the question is presented in a way that does not elicit a direct answer (self-questioning, invitation to speculate, a lesser certainty about the knowledge of the addressee) that favors a subjective use of the device, and, second, it has the potential to add a secondary meaning to the question by making it biased (conveying irony, criticism, or pointing out a problematic issue), which is preferred in intersubjective contexts. In these cases, the question goes beyond its literal meaning and is used more like a statement or a judgment, so the necessity to provide an answer is also diminished, but these questions can nevertheless be answered by the addressee (who, instead of answering the question as an information request, most often provides an explanation). This conclusion is in line with the results of Laanesoo about reversed polarity questions in Estonian (Laanesoo 2012, 514–5), so that we can affirm that huvitav questions can also have a rhetorical function in discourse. In addition, the data revealed that when this device was used to ask a question in order to elicit an answer, without any secondary meaning, the previous context contained elements related to the positioning of the speaker in regard to the knowledge state of the addressee. As this resource can also be part of a cluster of questions concerning an ongoing topic, we saw that considerably longer excerpts can be built on it, with secondary effects only emerging after the huvitav question, suggesting a more complex interplay between the target construction and its environment.

Transcription conventions and abbreviations

[]

overlapping talk

=

latching of turns

underlining

emphasis

:

extension of preceding sound

(0.5)

pause length

(.)

micropause

.

falling intonation

,

fall not to low

hh

audible outbreath

1

first person

ade

adessive

D

daughter

dem

demonstrative

EstParl

Estonian Parliament

F

father

imp

impersonal voice

ine

inessive

M

mother

MIN

minister

MP

member of parliament

neg

negation

pl

plural

ppt

past participle

prt

partitive

q

question particle

VP

vice president