”Det tror du ikke på?” Deklarative spørgsmål som grammatikaliserede metaspørgsmål

Declarative questions – although highly frequent in spoken interaction, and well-described in interactional linguistics – have been treated only superficially in the Danish grammatical tradition. Based on a discussion of previous grammatical and interactional treatments of declarative questions, this paper explores central structural-functional and distributional features of Danish declarative questions, arguing that, unlike the canonical interrogative and hv- question types, declarative questions encode metacommunicative meaning. Only through illocutionary modification of the declarative questions by e.g. dialogical particles, sentence adverbials or tag questions can their metacommunicative component be overridden, allowing for speech act functions similar to those of the canonical question types.