The syntactic, semantic and pragmatic study of questions in selected conversations

Abstract EN

This piece of work deals with questions, due to their importance in daily life.

People either ask, answer or hear question at least every two or three sentences in their conversations.

Questions can be defined as terms used to elicit information or a response from the addressee.

In English, question is a sentence with inversion of the subject and the first verb in the verb phrase (yes-no question) such as "Does he work hard?", starting with wh-words as "where did you go?" or ending with tag question as "He is a good student ,isn’t he?" This study aims at investigating the question forms in selected conversations and analyzing their discourse,pragmatic and speech act functions .

Ritchards and Richard's (2002 : 437) model has been adopted to analyze the data .

A lot of results have been obtained, such as wh-questions are used by the participants of conversation more than any other type in the corpus they have 39% proportion in this study, then yes no-questions are also commonly used by the questioners,they represent 25 % of the total questions number.

It is found also through the statistical results that intonation questions are relatively low, the types like tag, echo and closed-choice questions are relatively rare.

In addition, they have a range of semantic and pragmatic propositions when they are used indirectly.

The study has ended with some recommendations for the pedagogical study