Common ground management in wh-questions

This paper investigates the syntax and pragmatics of a peculiar type of wh-questions found in Martinican Creole and characterized by the presence of the clausal determiner la in sentence-final position. Regular and la-marked wh-questions do not differ as far as their internal and external syntax is concerned. Pragmatically, however, la-marked wh-questions stand out in the two following ways: (a) they cannot be uttered out of the blue, and (b) they do not tolerate nothing-type answers. I attribute these properties to the presence of la, which I argue is the spell-out of a [+familiar] feature. Accordingly, a la-marked wh-question will refer to a familiar QUD introduced through the prior addition of an existential proposition to the common ground. On the basis of the interpretational properties of la-marked wh-questions, as well as the distribution of la, I propose that la is merged in the Grounding layer proposed by Wiltschko (2021). This is consistent with the fact that it plays a role in the management of the common ground. Beyond Martinican Creole, this analysis lends support to the assumption that certain pragmatic functions are encoded in the grammar.