In recent years, there has been considerable linguistic interest in ‘non-canonical questions’
(Dayal 2016). These constructions express some quantity of interrogative meaning, as
well as some additional bias, or some additional request beyond pure information seeking.
This category includes four constructions with ‘negation’, which look superficially similar
but have received varying analyses in the literature: matrix biased questions; tag
questions; polar rhetorical questions, and interrogative exclamatives. In this thesis, I
address the question of how these constructions are related, and argue that the
relationships between these four ‘non-canonical questions’ are closer than the existing
literature suggests, building on and extending work from Sudo (2013) and Domaneschi et
al. (2017) who establish a framework for using speakers’ epistemic beliefs and the biases
provided by the evidential context to account for matrix biased questions. In order to
develop this overarching argument, I focus primarily on two constructions that have
received little attention in the literature: –int in Glasgow Scots and –n in the Shetland
dialect of Scots. I adapt an acceptability judgment style methodology for dialect syntax
research to incorporate recent work on non-canonical questions in experimental
pragmatics in order to establish the distribution of these particles across constructions
and belief/bias contexts. As part of this, I also qualitatively investigate how speakers of
different ages in communities with different relationships to linguistic change interact
with this common methodology for investigating linguistic variation, positing what I term
‘perceptual hyperdialectalism’ for the patterns of behaviour we see in an obsolescing
variety. From the results of the Scots research, I show that –int is acceptable in a subset
of the ‘non-canonical questions’, with –n available in the full set for older speakers but
seemingly undergoing loss in one context and moving towards the distribution of Glasgow
–int for younger speakers. This suggests that we should indeed treat the non-canonical
question constructions as more closely related than the literature suggests. I then provide
an analysis for the –int and –n constructions, arguing that they are check moves by
establishing the pragmatic similarities between the constructions that permit the
particles and then developing a semantic analysis for them within Ginzburg’s (2012)
interactional semantics for dialogue. The final part of this analysis is to position the
particles syntactically. I do so by employing a conversational domain in the syntax above
CP, and by arguing for movement to this domain I build on existing literature that shows
that discourse particles exhibit syntactic behaviour and should be analysed as such.
My analysis of the Scots data has three main contributions: firstly, a full
description and analysis of the previously understudied Scots particles; secondly, an
analysis for standard English tag questions that clearly shows how they differ from the
Scots constructions and is also able to deal with problematic data from the literature
more accurately than other proposals; thirdly, new evidence that there needs to be more
fine-grained distinctions made, based on beliefs and biases, between the types of
conversational move that are made in e.g. tag questions and invariant particles, often
grouped together as ‘confirmationals’ or ‘checks’.
As well as the Scots data, I also address the relationship between the four non-canonical
questions through two sets of constructions in standard English. Firstly, I present
the results of an experiment which shows that although both matrix biased questions and
tag questions are permitted in neutral and negative evidential contexts, speakers prefer
biased questions in negative contexts, and tag questions in neutral ones. I show that this
follows from the analysis I presented for the syntax and semantics of tag questions in
standard English, and suggest that the results point towards a scalar model of beliefs and
biases as the best way to understand the licensing of interrogative constructions.
Finally, I look at polar rhetorical questions and rhetorical wh-questions. In the
literature, these constructions receive the same analysis throughout. However, the Scots
data indicates that the bias that is, or can be, expressed in polar rhetorical questions is
not the same as the bias that is expressed in rhetorical wh-questions. I argue that polar
rhetorical questions should receive the same analysis as matrix biased questions, following
Romero’s (2015) falsum/verum approach to the construction, and show that this cannot
hold for wh-questions. I then extend Kotek’s (2016) semantics for wh-questions to also
include rhetorical wh-questions, showing how this can account for a number of properties
that these constructions have (e.g. polarity flipped vs. non-flipped instances, NPI licensing,
lack of pair-list readings and ‘generic’ interpretations)