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In:The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 46] 2025
► pp. 150–179

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Speech acts and interrogative particles

An empirical study on the grammar of Catalan eh?

 | University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
 | Universitat Pompeu Fabra
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.06cas
Abstract
The purpose of this work is to characterize the Catalan interrogative tag eh?, which has two fundamental pragmatic meanings. In one (eh1?), the speaker asks the addressee to reveal a private commitment p, corresponding to the denotation of the sentence anchor; in the other (eh2?), the speaker reinforces a conversational implicature associated with the uttered speech act. In the case of an assertion, eh2? prompts the addressee to believe that p is true. After the core analysis, we present a corpus study that compares how the discourse continues after a tag-containing utterance, showing that eh1? engages the addressee more than eh2?. Finally, we extend our proposal to include other speech acts, thus accounting for the divide between eh1? and eh2? concerning their possible sentence anchors.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Empirical landscape
    • 2.1Previous literature
    • 2.2Ambiguity
    • 2.3Compatibility with oi?
    • 2.4An uninformed addressee
    • 2.5Predicted reactions
    • 2.6Different sentence types as anchors
    • 2.7Interim summary
  • 3.Towards a proposal
    • 3.1Eh1? is not like oi?
    • 3.2Eh1? as a request for public commitment
    • 3.3Eh2? is not a confirmational tag
  • 4.What happens after a tag utterance
    • 4.1Additional predictions
    • 4.2Corpus study
      • 4.2.1Methodology
      • 4.2.2Results
      • 4.2.3Discussion
  • 5.Extending the analysis to other speech acts
  • 6.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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