Superquestions and some ways to answer them

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.