Interrogative utterances in media speech

This study treats the formal types of interrogative utterances in media speech. Conclusions are based on data from the Corpus of Spoken Bulgarian BgSpeech as well as on media interview recordings from 2023. The data show that journalists use interrogative sentences with wh-word or with question particle in their speech, and none of these formal types prevails. It is much more frequent that both formal types are used within one and the same utterance. Interrogative utterances without a question word were also found, and they are marked as interrogative only by the intonation. Interrogative utterances are predominantly direct speech acts. Only unconventional indirect speech acts with particle li are characteristic for the communicative situation in media interview.