Rhetorical questions are an interesting linguistic phenomenon that provides valuable information
about the interaction of different linguistic levels. Previous literature has mainly been concerned
with lexical markers of rhetoricity (e.g. particles, negation, polarity items). One important marker of
rhetoricity that has as yet hardly been investigated systematically is the prosodic realization of
rhetorical questions. The present project aims at closing this gap. It investigates how interrogative
clauses that are syntactically and lexically ambiguous in terms of their illocution (rhetorical question
vs. information-seeking questions; e.g. G: Wer war denn noch nicht in Berlin?, E: Who has not
been to Berlin?) are prosodically realized in German and how such lexically and syntactically
ambiguous interrogative clauses are interpreted.
