Surprise questions in English and French

The aim of this article is to show that a specific type of non-canonical question, namely surprise questions, needs to be defined in its own right and differentiated from rhetorical questions. The communicative function of surprise questions is explained on the basis of three constructions – what the hell questions in English, qu’est-ce que questions, and c’est quoi ce N (i.e. an in situ interrogative followed by a right dislocation) in French. Surprise questions are reported to be expressive and to request an explanation for or a change in an activity judged to be incongruous. However, only the intensification conveyed by the hell systematically guarantees the expressive reading. In French, the surprise reading is argued to rely on a combination of syntactic structure, prosodic features, and lexical items. While qu’est-ce que questions are syntactically more complex and diverse, the in situ construction followed by a right dislocation allows for the surprise reading to be more readily identified as such.