Superquestions and some ways to answer them

Abstract Earnings Conference Calls, in which corporate management are quizzed by investment analysts, are a particularly rich source of a phenomenon of question-asking that, though less prevalent, also occurs in many other genres of discourse. When a participant in a dialogue is allowed to ask more than one question consecutively — particularly in order to extend or refine or recast — we see that respondents often react by answering either one or more of the individual questions, or by answering a question that was never actually asked, but which is related to the explicit questions and to other content introduced in the turn. We call this overarching implicit question a superquestion , and explore how they can be formed, how they can be answered, how they trigger argumentation, and, indeed, how they can be dodged.