ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of possible intonation contours in WHQs. If rising final intonation is considered 'typical' in YNQs, the same is often said of falling intonation in wh-questions (WHQs), the last syntactically distinct interrogative question type to be examined in this survey. In short, whether the interactive pragmatic or the semantically-based route is taken, the clear anaphoric relationship between wh-word and preceding utterance prevents B from being assertive, and like the typical echo questions discussed in the last section, his utterance fails to show a low phrase accent. The chapter shows why both kinds of questions-if one wants to treat them as distinct kinds, as is traditionally done-pose a puzzle for the general analysis of falling WHQs presented above: it is not clear what proposition the speaker can expect to assert by uttering them.
