Using polar questions as confirming forms in interchange

Abstract EN

There is a kind of challenge the argument put forth by Corbett (1991) that, within multiple antecedent agreement, the two possible agreement strategies, Resolution and Partial Agreement, can be viewed as semantic and syntactic agreement, respectively.

Resolution, while semantically motivated and involving input from all of the agreement controllers, is not the same as semantic agreement in singleantecedent contexts.

Partial Agreement, which relies on the morphological features of only one of the antecedents, still requires reference to the semantic features of both antecedents, as this strategy is more likely when the controllers are inanimate.

Instead, I propose that the distribution of the two strategies – which nonetheless reflects the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979) and the Predicate Hierarchy (Comrie 1975) – is a product of the cognitive difficulty multiple antecedent agreement contexts pose for the speaker, such that the rules for this context are really part of broader principles within and across languages .The ability to request clarification of utterance is a vital part of the communicative process.

In conversation analysis, questions are explicated in sequential terms .They constrain relevant types and forms of response in the next turn , and the specifics of response construction provide resources that inform how questions and their actions and constraints are understood.

These polar question are question that are designed to receive a conforming answer of the same polarity as the question, so –called ''same Polarity Questions.

Speakers accomplish this bias by formatting the question in accordance with their state of knowledge.

Our case study looks at how polar questions are confirmed.

For confirming a polar question like „Have they gone?‟, all languages provide two basic alternatives: an interjection type strategy (something like „Yes‟) and a repetition type strategy (something like „They have gone‟).

Combinations of these are also possible.

Does selection of one of these options have a definable pragmatic function? An analysis of cases from English telephone calls shows that interjection type confirmations are used when the confirmation is relatively straightforward in interactional terms, and where the epistemic terms of the question are accepted by the person who is confirming.

By contrast, repetition type confirmations are associated with pragmatic functions where the answerer is in some way resisting the epistemic terms of the question, or dealing with a perturbation of the interactional sequence.

We argue that the inherent semiotics of the two strategies explain why they have this distribution; i.e., the researcher do not expect that interjection forms would be standardly used for non-straightforward confirmations, etc.

In other words, the form-function mapping observed in English is a non-arbitrary one.

Given that this semiotic motivation for choosing one over the other alternative for confirming polar questions should be present in other languages as well, we predict that the mapping observed in English will be observed in other languages as well.