ABSTRACT
Echo declarative questions are not necessarily literal echoes of the preceding utterance; they can also echo the information content of the proposition they convey (van der Sandt 1991), their formal properties such as word order, phonetics, or register (Poschmann 2008), or the illocutionary act they express (Noh 1998). Kiss (2017) claims that negative wh-constructions with since when as their wh-phrase behave similarly: they can target the same range of aspects of the previous utterance as echo declarative questions. The present chapter aims to draw a parallel between these two question types by showing their felicitous appearance in a representative set of pragmatic contexts. It further argues that the range of aspects the two questions can target is wider than what has been proposed in the literature, as it also contains rhetorical relations (Asher & Lascarides 2003) and stancetaking (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989).
Echo declarative questions and since when questions differ from each other in their potential to echo in several ways. Since when questions are more restricted in their distribution compared to echo declarative questions as they favor contexts where there is disagreement or disapproval. To grasp this difference, a distinction between metalinguistic and meta-conversational echoes is introduced. Metalinguistic echoes take linguistic material as their argument, such as the information content or the form of an utterance; meta-conversational echoes operate on a more abstract level, as they target discourse moves. While declarative questions can serve both as metalinguistic and meta-conversational echoes, since when questions cannot always be metalinguistic echoes, but they can always echo at the meta-conversational level.
