Workshop at the 49^th annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), (Lang-AG)

Call for Papers

Organizers: Ebrar Beşinci, Timo Buchholz, Robin Edds, James Griffiths, Paula Menéndez Benito (Universität Tübingen), Ilaria Frana (University of Enna "Kore")

Non-canonical questions (NCQs) override the default settings associated with ordinary information-seeking questions (Farkas 2022, to appear). Canonical questions present an open issue, signal that the speaker does not know how to resolve it, and that she assumes that the addressee can (and will) provide an answer.  Instead, rhetorical questions (Is the Pope Catholic?) can raise already solved issues. Biased questions (Aren’t you hungry?) signal that the speaker favors one of the answers and is thus not fully ignorant. Conjectural questions (Where could the key be?) override the addressee’s knowledge assumption. Probing questions (He does WHAT for a living?) heighten the expectation that the addressee can provide an informative answer, and echo-questions (She loves auteur cinema?!) indicate the need to resolve an issue in the conversation itself while suspending acceptance of the preceding move. 
In recent years, a substantial body of work on NCQs has emerged (see, e.g., Eckardt et al to appear, Trinh et al. 2025, Trotzke 2023). Some of the key issues addressed in this research are:

1. How should the discourse properties of NCQs be modelled?  
2. How do the formal (morphosyntax, prosody) properties of NCQs impact on their pragmatic profile?
3. How do NCQs interact with other linguistic devices that switch default conversational parameters (e.g., evidential or mirative markers)?

This workshop aims to bring together researchers that investigate these and related issues. A focal point of the workshop will be micro-variation in the form-function correspondence, also across languages, dialects, and registers. This ‘microscopic’ perspective is crucial for developing fine-grained responses to the questions in (1-3). For instance, the syntactic position of the verb of wohl questions in German has been shown to subtly impact their discourse effect (Eckardt 2020). Similarly, the difference between information-seeking wh-in-situ questions and mishearing and indignant wh-echo questions was found to consist mostly of gradient differences in duration and pitch alignment and scaling in production (Repp & Rosin 2015) that interact with word order to achieve recognition above chance in perception (Biezma et al. 2021).
We invite contributions for talks of 20(+10) minutes on empirical or theoretical projects investigating how such small variations in form may lead to different pragmatic uses, and how different methodologies can bring out this variation. We are especially interested in results arising from linguistic varieties that are underrepresented in the previous literature. Contributions from doctoral students and early career researchers are particularly welcome.

Please note that a speaker at DGfS 2027 may be presenting author only on a single contribution, but may be co-author on several presentations at the conference.

For evaluation, initial abstracts must be anonymous and should not exceed 2 pages of text (A4, minimum font size 12pt, 2.5 cm margins), including figures, examples and references. Be aware that for the official book of abstracts of the DGfS, after acceptance you will be asked to submit a final version of the abstract where everything (including references) has to fit on a single page.  
Please send your anonymous abstract as a pdf via mail to ncq.workshop2027spam prevention@gmail.com. In the email, please provide your own name as well as those of any contributors and indicate who of you will be presenting at the workshop.

Important dates:
Deadline for initial abstract submission: July 15, 2026
Notification: August 31, 2026
Deadline for final abstract submission after acceptance: November 15, 2026
Workshop time and place: March 2-5, 2027, University of Jena (at the 49^th annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS))

Selected references.
Biezma, Maria, Bettina Braun, & Angela James. 2021. Prosody is adding what?: Echo questions are not a thing. Semantics and Linguistic Theory, 241–261. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v31i0.5084 Eckardt, Regine. 2020. Conjectural questions: The case of German verb-final wohl questions. Semantics and Pragmatics 13(9). 1-17. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.9 Farkas, Donka. 2022. Non-Intrusive Questions as a Special Type of Non-Canonical Questions. Journal of Semantics, 39(2), 295–337. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffac001 Farkas, Donka. To appear. Canonical and non-canonical questions in discourse. In Regine Eckardt, George Walkden & Nicole Dehé (eds.), The Oxford handbook of non-canonical questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Repp, Sophie, & Lena Rosin. 2015. The intonation of echo wh-questions. Interspeech 2015, 938–942. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2015-16 Trinh, Tue, Anton Benz, Daniel Goodhue, Kazuko Yatsushiro, & Manfred Krifka. 2025. Biased questions. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17084327 Trotzke, Andreas. 2023. Non-canonical questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.