Lesson plan

Echo question

An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance (the stimulus), by repeating it back in some form. For example: A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving where? In English, echo questions have a distinctive prosody, featuring a rising intonation. A speaker may use an echo question to seek confirmation because they find the stimulus surprising, or simply because they did not hear it clearly. Echo questions have unusual syntactic properties (including a lack of wh-movement), which have made them a challenge to account for in linguistic theories of questions.

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Article summary

An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance (the stimulus), by repeating it back in some form. For example: A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving where? In English, echo questions have a distinctive prosody, featuring a rising intonation. A speaker may use an echo question to seek confirmation because they find the stimulus surprising, or simply because they did not hear it clearly. Echo questions have unusual syntactic properties (including a lack of wh-movement), which have made them a challenge to account for in linguistic theories of questions.

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Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.