Reich, Ingo; Lemke, Tyll Robin; Schäfer, Lisa
Questions under discussion, salience and the acceptability of fragments
Konietzko, Andreas; Winkler, Susanne; (Ed.): Information Structure and Discourse in Generative Grammar: Mechanisms and Processes, De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 157–190, Berlin; Boston, 2026.
This paper tests the predictions of the QUD approach (Roberts 1996) with respect to the processing of discourse-initial fragments. To this effect, we present three empirical studies, two production studies and an acceptability rating study. In a pretest, we first estimate the salience of potential QUDs in a given utterance context c (= context-based likelihood). In the first experiment, we then estimate the salience of QUDs given both the utterance context c and the utterance a itself (= answer-based likelihood). In the second experiment subjects rate discourse-initial fragments and sentences a that relate to a QUD with an either high (= predictable) or low (= unpredictable) context-based likelihood. Our results show that the answer-based likelihoods do not predict the ratings, which is surprising given the assumptions of the QUD approach. At the same time the data suggests (i) that subjects generally prefer utterances whose QUD is already salient in the utterance context, and (ii) that retrieving the QUD of fragments with a rather low context-based likelihood requires higher processing effort, which is in turn reflected in degraded ratings.