On Conjectural Questions in Japanese: With Special Reference to Speech Act Phrase

Abstract

This paper deals with two kinds of conjectural questions, which do not require the discourse role of Hear, and argues that they involve Speech Act Phrase (Speas & Tenny 2003), which, in these questions, is motivated for reasons related to Speaker, which serves to control the Point-of-View operator in these sentences. It also discusses the relevance of the Interrogative Flip (Tenny 2006) in polite conjectural questions, which are addressed to Hearer. The suggested analysis is shown to be able to handle other WH-sentences as well.