Questions Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives [Paperback]

This book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes.Bringing together a team of formal linguists, functional linguists, discourse analysts, anthropologists, psychologists and sociolinguists, this book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes. The volume includes data from a range of languages and cultures.Bringing together a team of formal linguists, functional linguists, discourse analysts, anthropologists, psychologists and sociolinguists, this book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes. The volume includes data from a range of languages and cultures.The view that questions are 'requests for missing information' is too simple when language use is considered. Formally, utterances are questions when they are syntactically marked as such, or by prosodic marking. Functionally, questions request that certain information is made available in the next conversational turn. But functional and formal questionhood are independent: what is formally a question can be functionally something else, for instance, a statement, a complaint or a request. Conversely, what is functionally a question is often expressed as a statement. Also, verbal signals such as eye-gaze, head-nods or even practical actions can serve information-seeking functions that are very similar to the function of linguistic questions. With original cross-cultural and multidisciplinary contributions from linguists, anthropologists, psychologists and conversation analysts, this book asks what questions do and how a question can shape the answer it evokes.1. Introduction: questions are what they do Jan P. de Ruiter; Part I. Questions: Interplay between Form and Function: 2. Interrogative intimations: on a possible social economics of interrogatives Stephen C. Levinson; 3. Structures and questions in decision-making dialogues Jerry R. Hobbs; 4. Mobilising response in interaction: a compositional view of questions Tanyalc%