The form and function of questions in informal dyadic conversation

Journal

of Pragmatics

21 (1994) 621-644

621

North-Holland

The form and function of questions in informal dyadic conversation Alice F. Freed* Received August 1992; revised version May I993

This paper presents an analysis of 1275 question tokens which occurred in approximately seven hours of conversation between twelve pairs of same-sex friends; the conversations were taped in an experimental setting. The paper establishes a taxonomy of question functions which illustrates how questions vary along an information continuum and presents findings which show a notable correspondence between the pragmatic/social function of questions and their syntactic form as used in informal dyadic conversation. Central to the discussion are the specifies multiple ways that questions function for speakers in casual conversation and the correspondences between the function and the syntactic form of the questions used to accomplish these particular goals.

1. The study of questions

Questions (or interrogatives) have been investigated at every level of linguistic analysis for decades. Research on the prosody, syntax, logic, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistic nature and conversational usefulness of questions can be found in a wide range of scholarly journals and books. In particular, speech act theorists have attempted to distinguish the illocutionary force of question utterances from their semantic content (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Bach and Harnish, 1979). Conversation analysts have examined sequences of questions and their answers in order to understand how questions work in structuring conversation (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Schegloff et al., 1977; Schegloff, 1984; Geis, 1989) and in negotiating turn-taking in talk (Sacks et al., 1974). Psycholinguists and child-language specialists have explored Correspondence to: A.F. Freed, Linguistics Department, Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. * I would like to thank Alice Greenwood for our many thought-provoking and productive conversations about language in general and questions in particular. I would also like to thank Antoinette Spiotta at Montclair State College for allowing me to use the facilities of the Psychoeducational Center for taping these conversations. A much abridged version of this paper was read at the LSA Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, 1993.

0378-2166/94/%07.00 0 1994 SSDI 0378-2166(93)E0053-3

Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

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A. F. Freed 1 The form and,function

of questions

how questions reflect language development and how questions are used by adults as pedagogical tools to teach children specific language skills, e.g. shared focus, interpretation, etc. (Keenan et al., 1978; Dore and McDermott, 1982). Anthropological linguists interested in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication have compared the form and function of questions in different languages (Roberts and Forman, 1972; Goody, 1978). For example, Hymes (1974) warns that the meaning of particular questions cannot be defined out of context, and that each speech community develops norms for understanding how questions should be formulated and interpreted. In recent years, the use of questions in conversations between women and men has been studied as part of research on language and gender (Fishman, 1978, 1980; Holmes, 1982, 1984; Freed and Greenwood, 1992; Greenwood and Freed, 1992).l While there is general agreement that questions have an identifiable syntactic form, a characteristic prosodic nature, a semantic or propositional content which is separate from their pragmatic and social function (Hudson, 1975) and separate also from their various roles in conversational interaction, there is considerable disagreement about how questions should be defined and analyzed. Significant in the debate about questions are the following issues: (1) whether the form of an utterance as an interrogative has any bearing on its role in conversation, an issue raised by Schegloff (1984) and discussed by Geis (1989); (2) whether questions are correctly characterized as being sentences from an addressee which are “so marked [in order] to gain information” (Sadock and Zwicky, 1985: 178) (see Searle, 1969: 69; Ervin-Tripp and Miller, 1977: 15; Bach and Harnish, 1979: 48; Kiefer, 1981: 161; Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 253); (3) whether questions should, therefore, be described as utterances which require (or elicit) a verbal or non-verbal response (Kearsley, 1976: 359; Hudson, 1975: 16; Lyons, 1977: 7455756; Kiefer, 1980: 97798, 1981: 161; Sadock and Zwicky, 1985: 160; Levelt, 1989: 66); (4) whether questions must, accordingly, be analyzed along with their answers (or responses) as part of adjacency pairs as suggested by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and Sacks et al. (1974); and (5) whether any meaningful connections exist between different levels of analysis in the study of questions (Kearsley, 1976; Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Geis, 1989; Holmes, 1990; Sinclair and Van Gessel, 1990). This paper establishes a taxonomy of question functions which suggests a new way of looking at questions and presents findings which show a notable correspondence between the pragmatic/social function of questions and their syntactic form as used in informal dyadic conversation. The specifics of the multiple ways that questions function for speakers in casual conversation will be central to the analysis (section 3). The correspondences between the 1 For a discussion of questions on topics not directly related to the ones explored in this paper, see Bolinger (1957), Aqvist (1965), Hii (1978), Kiefer (1983), and Geluykens (1987, 1988, 1989).

A. F. Freed / The form and function of questions

623

function and the syntactic form? of the questions are examined in section 4. The discussion which follows the analysis (section 5) explores the problems outlined above and proposes solutions to several of the issues raised.

2. Methodology In this work, questions qua interrogatives are considered as linguistic entities which are structurally defined, occur naturally in discourse, have psychological reality for speakers and hearers, (i.e. are easily recognized as questions), and as such represent a concrete place to begin. The data for this study are from twelve conversations of approximately thirty-five minutes each, recorded in a laboratory setting. The study was originally designed to investigate how women and men use questions when talking to same-sex friends, to see if there are any differences between women’s use of questions in friendly conversation and men’s, and to discover the effect of different conversational and situational requirements on the speech of the participants. (For a discussion of the results of this research, see Freed and Greenwood (1992) and Greenwood and Freed (1992).) The informants used for this project were all white, middle and working class women and men who were students at a state college in New Jersey and/or members of the local community. They had been invited to participate in a study of friendship and were asked to bring a friend of the same sex to a specified location at the college; they were informed in advance that they would be audio- and video-recorded during the study. Although the conversations were elicited under experimental conditions, the speech samples which were collected were overall quite natural and relatively free of speaker inhibition. The audiotapes of the complete conversations were transcribed. Questions were identified in each transcript, yielding a total of 1275 question tokens from the approximately seven hours of taped conversation3

3. Taxonomy of question functions A taxonomy of question functions was developed from the actual questiontypes which occurred in the data. An earlier version of this taxonomy was described in Freed and Greenwood (1992). (See also Greenwood and Freed, 1992.) When the data were examined, it became clear that questions were * Form does not refer to the mand or mood or general sentence type, as the term is used to distinguish among declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives. Rather, it describes the different syntactic types of interrogatives which occur. 3 A full description of the methodology used is given in Freed (1993).

624

A. F. Freed / The form and function of questions

functioning in a number of different ways and that their various functions had to be carefully analyzed within the context of the particular talk situation in which they occurred. It was only after consideration of the type of information that the questions referred to when uttered in specific conversational contexts that the important connection among them became evident. The questions analyzed in these data fall along a continuum; they range from the most narrowly factual questions asked, e.g. What is today’s date?, to questions which are a reflection of an individual speaker’s expressive style, e.g. . . . he turns around and starts screwing me over, and everyone’s like, what the heck, you know, what happened?. Rather than ask what the speaker’s intent or attitude was in uttering a particular question, the literal meaning of the question under study was considered. This meaning was determined by identifying what information, if any, was sought by the question. In most cases the nature of this information led to an understanding of the question’s function in its conversational context. It was found that questions were used to ask about various kinds of information and that they provided speakers with the means to inquire about the external world, the hearer’s life and emotions, about shared events and experiences and about the conversation itself. There were a large number of questions, however, which sought no information at all, despite previous researchers’ claims to the contrary (Sadock and Zwicky, 1985: 178). Some of these were used by the speaker to get the hearer to focus on a particular point in the conversation or to check that the hearer was already attending to some particular point. In addition, many questions occurred to which the speaker had the answer or for which there simply was no answer. In these cases, no information was being sought from the hearer; such questions were, instead, an expressive choice of the speaker’s and conveyed information to the hearer. For example, in the following exchange, if Speaker A had uttered the declarative There is nothing she can do about it in place of the question What’s she going to do about it?, the difference would not have been in the information that the speaker was seeking from the hearer but in what the speaker was expressing to the hearer about the situation. A: She’s going to be small, though, whatever. She’s not happy about B: Really? A: She’ll be fine. B: She’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. A: What’s she going to do ahout it? B: Yeah. She’ll be fine. An information alized occurrences

probably. it.

I mean

she has Mike’s genes,

function was determined for each of the 1275 contextuof questions in this corpus. Each question was classified

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625

according to the type of information which it sought or conveyed. Although a question could be interpreted as serving more than one purpose within a conversation, a primary function was identified for each question from the context in which it occurred. For example, a speaker might use a question which, in isolation, would seem to elicit factual social information, but which, in context, was seen to elicit elaboration of some previous utterance. Thus, the context that preceded and followed each question was considered in arriving at the specific classification of that individual question as it occurred at a particular point in a conversation. When an answer occurred, it provided clues about the taxonomic classification of that question. When no response followed a question and the speaker did not contest the lack of a reply, this usually signaled that the speaker was not seeking information. Each question token was separately accounted for and no a priori set of functional categories was established. As examples were found which did not conform to previously studied forms, new categories were added. Definitions and criteria which did not require speculation about the psychological frame of mind of the speaker were established for each functional category. The taxonomy developed illustrates how questions vary along an information continuum; those which seek factual information, characterized as public information, are situated at one end of the continuum; at the other end are questions which are the expressive choice of the speaker, and communicate rather than elicit information. Proceeding along the continuum, the type of information changes from new public-domain information, to shared or given information (Clark and Haviland, 1977) to phatic information (Malinowski, 1923) and finally to rhetorical and other conveyed information. Sixteen different functional categories were established on the continuum shown in Table 1. The taxonomy is not symbolized by a circle in the manner used by Goody (1978); instead, the taxonomy is represented by a linear continuum so that the two ends are not rejoined. This conceptualization of question-function captures the notion that questions serve multiple purposes which vary by degree of informational content. The question-functions range from those which seek factual public information from the hearer, to question-functions which convey information from the speaker to the hearer. Similarly, these categories are not represented by a tree diagram or branching graph as done by Kearsley (1976) and Sinclair and Van Gessel (1990). Such characterizations fail to capture the similarities across functional types, on the one hand, and the subtle differences between functions which are placed adjacent to each other on a continuum, on the other hand. As will be shown below, for purposes of analysis it is useful to conflate the categories into four broader classes, despite the fact that such an integration of functional types obscures certain significant insights which can otherwise be obtained about question functions.

626 Table 1 Taxonomy

A. F. Freed / The form and function of questions

of question

functions

2 INFORMATION SOUGHT rp public information 1 social information EXTERAAL social invitation I \ deictic information 1 clarification of

conversational focus shared information phatic information didactic

function

self-directed

function

INFORMATION

Definitions

and examples

EXPRESSSIVE STYLE CONVEYED

of the functional

categories

are provided

below.

(I) Public information A question which asks for public domain information. Such questions are about the external world and request new factual information. (i) A: I want a doughnut. B: Go ahead. A: What kind are they? B: I don’t know. Powdered. A: Urn hum. B: Creamy and sugar. (ii) A: And there’s a job opening in Hyde at Hyde Point High School. It’s a really . . B: Oh, where’s that? A: It’s in Sussex County but I mean it is a ride but the thing is, the way she would be traveling, there would be no traffic at all. (2) Social information A question which asks for new private domain information of a factual and speciJic nature. Questions in this category pertain to the speakers, their lives and

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627

the people and events with which they are familiar. Private domain information is often more accessible to speakers than public domain information. (i) A: Are you going home tonight? B: I don’t know. If John’s around I will. If he’s not, I won’t. (ii) A: Like, you’d, did you watch 90210 last night? B: No. Barbara taped it at noon. (3)

Social invitation

A question which invites (or requests) information which involves the physical participation of the hearer or the speaker. Such questions are often described as indirect speech acts, understood as invitations or offers by way of conventional implicature (Levinson, 1893: 290; Geis, 1989: 54). (i) A: I think I will have a drink. Would you like some? B: Okay. (ii) A: You want to go shoot around after this? B: Yeah, there’s a court right behind my house, you know. (4)

Deictic information

A question which seeks to obtain new factual information about the immediate physical environment. Here the information is usually physically accessible. (i) A: What is this? (pointing) Do they hang kids in it? B: Uh uh. (ii) A: They sound pretty good for little punks. Do you hear them? Up there?

B: Yeah, really. (5)

Clartjication

of information

A question which asks for additional information related to the content of a previous utterance of the other speaker’s usually from the immediate conversation. The question itself is often a repetition or paraphrase of some part of this earlier utterance but the question seeks new information associated with the previous utterance. The information is treated by the current speaker as if it were still new information. This category, as well as the ones described in (6)

and (7) below, resemble what Schegloff et al. (1977) call ‘other-initiated repairs’. (i) A: No. He’s got a grandkid but it’s not from his kid. It’s from his second wife. From his, yeah, not his own grandchild. B: Oh, he’s remarried? A: Urn hum. (ii) A: What happened with Rose is that there is a Psycho Fair or something in a, urn . . . B: Psycho Fair? A: Yeah. Psycho. Psycho.

628

A. F. Freed / The form and function

of questions

B : (Laughs.) A: Psychobernetics and things like that. What are you laughing at? FA-I-R. B: Yeah, no, it’s like you were saying it’s like a Psycho Fair. You are trying . . . A: For crazies? B : Psychic. A: Psychic. I’m sorry. (6) Repetition of information A question which asks for a literal repetition of a previous utterance. The question asks for a repetition of the actual signal, not of the semantic content of a previous utterance. The nearly identical nature of the utterances which precede and follow such questions help identify them as belonging to this category. (i) A: What’s middle middle class like? B: Pardon? A: What’s middle middle class like? B: . . urn. (Reading:) “Do you consider yourself lower middle class, middle middle class -.” I guess middle. Straight average. (ii) A: Are you having it at the Drop-in? B: What did you say? A: You’re having it at the Drop-in? B: No, we’re having it, urn, in the Newman Center. (7) Confirmation of information A question which is used to confirm or verify what has already been heard. The question often asks for a repetition of the information which has been provided by the other speaker in the immediately preceding context; here the information is treated by the current speaker as given information. Clarification and confirmation questions can be distinguished by the nature of the information which they seek and the type of information which follows them. This use of confirmation is different from Sadock and Zwicky’s (1985 : 182) and others’, where confirmation refers to the speaker’s seeking agreement or disagreement from the hearer. Here the speaker is checking the accuracy or understanding of newly received information. (i) A: It was left at work and no one wanted it and like, “I’ll take it.” I think it’s neat. B: Oh, someone left it at work? A: Yeah. (ii) A: Because with his brother ~ my sister is married to his brother and he is totally the opposite. B: Your sister is married to his brother?

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629

A: I never told you that? Yeah. B : That’s fascinating. A: Yeah. (8) Conversational focus A question which refers the hearer to the informational content contained in what the current speaker is about to utter or about the direction the conversation is about to take. These are known elsewhere as “pre-announcements” (Levinson, 1983: 349). (i) A: Yeah, a n d t h en, urn, he walked upstairs. He walked upstairs. And I was waiting. That upset me. And you know what’s upsetting? When I’m excited about something, like like the way you responded to the living room, B: urn hum A: I wish once he’d say, “Oh this is, this is coming coming together!” (ii) A: My parents were like, my parents want to move to either Florida or California, like in the next year or so. I was like, “It damn well better be California cause Florida has no sports teams that I like.” B: The Dolphins, man. A: You know what it is? I hate the Dolphins. I’m a Jets fan. I hate the Dolphins. B: You like the Jets? A: Yeah. B: Get a team, man. (9) Shared information A question which seeks to establish the existence of mutual or shared information, knowledge or reactions. (i) A: . . . Remember how my math teacher, how he said he’s so evil and stuff? He’s cool. B: Yeah? A: Yeah. (ii) A: And I went, aid I tell you I went to, uh, away for a weekend? I went to a, uh. health spa. One day I thought I was just going to lose it totally. And I had to get away. And I, I looked in the Times and I found a health spa in South Jersey and I went. And it was, uh, like, it was a three day weekend. It was like, urn, Washington’s birthday weekend. And I went Friday, B: urn A: and got back Monday. I told you. B. Urn hum.

630

A. F. Freed 1 The ,farm and function

of‘ questions

(10) Phatic information A question which allows the speaker to check that the hearer is,following the information exchange in the conversation and/or is aware of the relevant background information. (i) A: The thing is, she can’t handle herself yet. You know what I mean? She can’t be bothered to do things for even herself. It’s like a big, you know, B: Big deal. A: Yeah. I mean, God, let alone do anything for a friend. (ii) A: . . . You have to try to spin them in. Know what I’m talking about? The computer game where you have like, uh, B: Oh, Tetrus. (I I) Elaboration A question which invites broadly deJned information exchange, often of a nonfactual, social and non-speciJic nature. Questions in this category differ from social information questions in that they elicit non-specific information to encourage open-ended discussion. In cases where such questions seem to pertain to specific social information, they actually encourage elaboration of the content of previous utterances. This is similar to the category referred to elsewhere as ‘conversational maintenance’ questions (Maltz and Borker, 1982). (i) A: Yeah, but what, what is it that, urn, that draws you to certain women and not to other women? B: That’s hard to say. You know yourself, there are certain, certain, certain types of people you are drawn to. I mean, we hit it off right away. (ii) A: Urn hum. That’s true. I think there’s definitely more, like guys can’t bond together as well as girls can among each other. Don’t you think? B: I don’t know. A: But why? B: Because. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I think that. I don’t know. (12) Didactic function A question which refers the hearer to information which the speaker alrea~~~ knows; the speaker is asking about certain information in order to teach the hearer something. (1) A: This is a physicoball. B: This is like a medicine ball. A: Do you know why? B: How can the little kids play with it?

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A: Do you know phys-i-cal? And it’s an “0” ‘cause they don’t want to put the “-Cal” and then“bal1.” (ii) A: Well, you know, what she really needs is, you know what she really needs? B : Therapy. A: She needs therapy. (13) Rhetorical function (a) A question which refers to information that the speaker already knows which is communicated to the hearer in the form of a question as part of the speaker’s expressive style, or (b) a question, the utterance of which, orients the hearer to the speaker’s point of view; this may convey sarcasm, irony, etc. In most cases the question is understood as being unanswerable. (See Hudson, 1975: 16, on rhetorical questions.) (ia) A: It’s really strange how some people can, like what was that? You know, like how did we, how did we become suite-mates and click like that, you know what I mean? Cause I don’t think that would have, like, when I look at all the other girls that I meet and stuff like that, I couldn’t picture myself becoming this good of friends as when I met Gena, you know what I mean? B: How come? A: I don’t know, I don’t know why. (iib) A: . . . Normally I leave 45 minutes before a class. Just to make sure. B: That long? A: Yeah. It’s too much, isn’t it? Then I get here early. B: I don’t get here that early. (14) Humor A question which expresses information from an unexpected point of view, communicated to the hearer in the form of a question as part of the speaker’s expressive style. Although the speaker usually knows the answer to such questions as with didactic and some rhetorical questions, the exchange which is sought is not. about information but shared amusement. No response is expected. (i) A: I forgot to ask you about this. What’re we, what is the, uh, B: What’re we doing? We’re going to have to give blood samples. A : (laughs) B: I didn’t tell you about that part? A: Ha. ha. Funny. (ii) A: I know, Lisa said she’s going to come back a fat pig. B: What do you mean, come back? A: Never mind. B: Anyway, go on.

632

A. F. Freed / The form and function

of questions

(15) Self-directed function A question which asks for information which only the speaker can supply, but orients the hearer toward the speaker in the process. The question is a reflection of the speaker’s expressive style. (i) A: Well, think about it. I, what do I think? I think it’s equal. B: You do? (ii) A: But, then, you know, now that I go out with Frank, I realize, wow, am I putting anybody on the back burner? I try to give people a call, you know, same sense, I am realizing who I am. B: Urn hum. (16) Reported speech A question which contains information from an entirely d$erent conversation the use of which reflects the speaker’s expressive style. Theoretically, questions which are used to report episodes from past or imagined events can consist of question types from all of the above functional categories. (i) A: I’m like, “Nanc, did he yell at you when you came back?” She’s like, “No, but I missed him.” I’m like, “Well, he was yelling at all of us.” B: That’s what I said when she came back. I’m like, “I’m, I’ve had it. I’m sick of your toasters. I don’t want to hear about Dutch Boy Paint. That’s it.” (ii) A: She says any, anytime. I said, “You have no problem with it?” She says no. I said, “What do you want to do?” cause I’m in for anything. She says, “You want to go to the movies?” I said great. So we’re gonna go to Totowa to see this, urn, new, uh, B: What time are you gonna go? As mentioned above, it is possible to conflate these sixteen categories into four more general functional classes. These classes continue to reflect the informational nature of the question and, in addition, underscore particular similarities among functional categories which are adjacent to one another on the continuum. While the similarities and differences from type to type are obscured by this grouping, the smaller number provides important advantages for purposes of analysis. The four general categories which emerge from the above described continuum are the following: (i) Questions which seek factual information EXTERNAL to the conversation. These include public information questions, social information questions, social invitations and deictic information questions. These are the sorts of questions most clearly associated with the traditional understanding of the role of questions in conversation: that is, when using questions from this group, speakers are normally seeking (but do not always receive) answers from a hearer which provide them with new information.

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Questions which seek information about the TALK or conversation itself. These consist of clarification questions, repetition questions and confirmation questions. As mentioned above, this category resembles what Schegloff et al. (1977) call ‘other-initiated repairs’. With these, as with external questions, speakers expect an answer following their questions. (iii) Questions which seek open-ended information about the verbal and social relationship between the speaker and hearer. Contained in this RELATIONAL group are conversational focus questions, shared information questions, phatic information questions and questions which ask for elaboration. These questions are frequently left unanswered. (iv) Questions which are a reflection of the speaker’s EXPRESSIVE STYLE and contain information already known to the speaker or pertaining to unavailable information. These include didactic questions, rhetorical questions, questions used for humor, self-directed questions and questions used in reported speech. In natural dyadic conversation, answers rarely follow these types of questions. These are distinct from the other categories since no information is sought from the hearer. Expressive Style questions, instead, express the speaker’s point of view and convey information rather than request it.4 Broad catagories of this sort have been suggested by other researchers, but never with the dimension of the information continuum presented here. By situating these four classes of questions along such a continuum, the relationship among the separate categories is preserved. The four functional classes described above are comparable to the four classes sketched by Kearsley (1976) in his review of questions. His categories of question functions correspond roughly to the ones presented here: “Epistemic” is approximately equivalent to External questions and “Echoic” to questions about Talk; “Social Control” is similar to questions here called Relational and “Expressive” corresponds to Expressive Style questions (1976: 360). Kearsley, however, tries to identify the speaker’s attitude in the expressive categories, and claims that the questions that fall under the expressive and social control rubrics are independent of the informational content of the questions (1976: 362). The objections to a categorical separation of the information referred to by a question and the question’s function are explained above. It is interesting to note that certain types of questions which are common in other settings did not occur in these data. Among these are questions which are referred to elsewhere as ‘suggestions’ (May, 1989) ‘requests’, ‘directives’ or ‘commands’, ‘greetings’, and ‘riddles’ (Roberts and Forman, 1972). The occurrence or non-occurrence of certain questions is predictable from the context; for example, since in this experimental setting, the participants always (ii)

4 Questions in this functional category occur somewhat less predictably than others, since different speakers choose different types of utterances to accomplish comparable communicative goals.

634

A. F. Freed / The form and function

of questions

arrived together, greetings between them were unnecessary. On the other hand, in the course of the conversations, it would have been entirely natural for either speaker to tell a riddle, make a suggestion, give a directive or make a request of the other, and so on. While it would be artificial to attempt to fit into this continuum question types which did not actually occur in the data, one might predict that these and other questions could mesh neatly with the continuum that has been established. Whether or not additional categories would be required would have to be empirically determined.

4. The mapping of form and function In the process of analyzing the questions used in these conversations, the syntactic form as well as the functional role of the individual question utterances were noted. It has been suggested that the physical shape of questions, i.e. their syntactic and intonational form, is not only separate from their pragmatic function but unrelated to their functional purpose. (See the discussion in Sinclair and Van Gessel, 1990.) However, when the forms and functions of questions are examined together, it becomes evident that a relationship exists between the two. Kearsley (1976), who speculates on such a correspondence without subjecting his hypothesis to empirical study, states that “there are simple and complex relationships between form and functional categories [of questions]” (1967: 363). He provides several interesting examples of the types of connections which he expects to find, but concedes that these are “guesses and require empirical confirmation” (1976: 363). On the other hand, in their study of the form and function of questions in conversations among French-speaking children, Sinclair and Van Gessel provide findings for the “existence of regularities in form-function mapping” of questions (1990: 924). They maintain that the difficulty which researchers have previously had in identifying the relations between form and function is a result of “naive view-points of the function(s) of utterances”, and not from problems related to analyzing form (1990: 942). The taxonomy of question functions established in this study provides a basis for a careful investigation of such correspondences and is, therefore, a valuable analytic tool. In addition to separately identifying the form and the primary function of each question utterance, each was classified according to its form and function together, e.g. a yes/no question used as a talk question. The analysis was based on the four broad functional categories outlined above: (i) questions about the external world, (ii) questions about the conversational content or talk, (iii) questions about the verbal and social relation between the speaker and hearer, and (iv) questions used as part of the speaker’s expressive style. These were correlated with four large and two small categories of syntactic form: (1) Yes/no questions, which included reduced

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yes/no and alternative questions, (2) wh-questions, (3) full declaratives and other syntactic phrases with a final phrase rise5 and (4) tag questions, including both canonical (or auxiliary) tags, e.g. They didn’t hit you, did they? and invariant (or lexical) tags, e.g. That’s where you lived, right?. Of the total 1275 questions, there were 58 tokens which did not clearly belong to any of these four categories. (5) A small group of wh-questions, 49 out of 450, were immediately followed by a phrase with final rise in tag position. These dualpart questions, sometimes called wh-question plus guess constructions (Norrick, 1992), e.g. How long have Z known you, three years?, were classified as being one rather than two questions. (6) In addition, there were nine instances of questions of the form how/what about . . . . e.g. What about when women get older, like when they get married and St@?. These, too, were grouped separately.6 It is interesting to note the relative proportion of the different syntactic types of questions in this corpus. The most frequently occurring questionform was the subject-auxiliary inversion or yes/no question (including its reduced form in which the preposed auxiliary is omitted). Of the 1275 questions, 519 or 41% were of this type. (294 were full yes/no questions; 214 were reduced yes/no’s and 11 were full alternative questions.) Another 401 or 3 1% of the questions in the corpus were wh-questions; 18% (23 1 tokens) were declarative and/or phrases with a final phrase rise. Tag questions accounted for 5% and the other question forms made up another 5%. See Table 2. Table 2 Syntactic

question

Y/N WH DECL 7 /PH r TAGS WH-PH 7

how/what about TOTALS

forms:

Frequency

of occurrence=

519 401 231 66 49

9

41% 31% 18% 5% 4% 1%

1275

100%

According to Kearsley, “some informal analysis of two-person dialogues suggests that the percentage of yes/no questions may exceed that of wh5 While it is recognized that intonational contours cannot be accurately described without the benefit of acoustic analysis, the question-types identified by intonation were so classified based on the perception of how they sounded within these conversations. For a recent discussion of question intonation, see Geluykens (1987, 1988, 1989). 6 The two-way distinction which is sometimes made between open (wh-questions) and closed (yes/no questions) is not considered here (see Kearsley, 1975: 358). This dichotomy is based largely on the different types of answers believed to be elicited by questions. As explained, the present analysis treats questions without considering the type of answer which may follow.

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636

qf questions

questions” (1976: 371) as compared to data from prose fiction which shows an overall higher proportion of wh-forms. He concludes that “the proportion of wh-questions to yes/no questions may vary with the degree of the formality of the discourse or the degree of intimacy between the speakers . ..” (1976: 371). The distribution of question forms in this corpus of informal dyadic conversation between friends confirms his suggestion. The correlation between forms which occurred and their functional role was calculated two different ways: first, by examining the distribution of different syntactic categories across the functional classes and second, by investigating whether questions of a particular functional category regularly occurred in a specific syntactic form. Correspondences were found in both directions. Table 3 shows that there are a number of interesting correlations in the mapping of syntactic form onto functional type. Of the 519 yes/no questions in the corpus, 32% were used for external questions and 39% occurred as relational questions. (Compare this to the mere 5% of yes/no questions which were used as talk questions and the 24% used for expressive style.) Of the 401 whquestions, 36% fell into the category of external questions and another 43% were used for stylistic expression. Further, almost two-thirds (65%) of the 23 1 declaratives and phrases with a final phrase rise were talk questions. Finally, of the limited number of tag-questions that occurred, only 66 in all, 45% were used as relational questions. The correlations found for tag-questions as well as for the other two syntactic categories may be of limited significance, given the low number of examples. These are also shown on Table 3. Table 3 The mapping

of form onto function

TOTALS (1275)

EXTERNAL

Y/N

32%

TALK

RELATIONAL

EXPRESSIVE STYLE

5%

39%

24%

= 100%

36%

9%

12%

43%

= 100%

18%

65%

8%

9%

= 100%

I 1%

17%

45%

27%

= 100%

57%

10%

6%

27%

= 100%

22%

0%

45%

33%

= 100%

(519) WH (401) DECL 7 /PH /” (231) TAGS (66) WH-PH

/”

(49) how/what about (9)

631

A. F. Freed / The form and function of questions

Table 4, which presents these relationships in a slightly different manner, reveals what syntactic form occurred when questions of different functional categories were used. We find that of the 385 questions about the external world, 43% are yes/no questions and 37% are wh-questions. Of the 231 talk questions, a striking 65% are in the form of declaratives or phrases with final phrase rise. There are 307 relational questions; of these, 66% are yes/no questions. Finally of the 352 questions used for expressive style, 35% were yes/no questions and 49% were wh-questions. See Table 4. Table 4 The mapping of function onto form TOTALS

Y/N

WH

DECL /= PHr

43%

37%

11%

2%

1%

0%

= 100%

12%

16%

65%

5%

2%

0%

= 100%

66%

16%

6%

10%

1%

1%

= 100%

35%

49%

6%

5%

4%

1%

= 100%

(1275) EXTERNAL

TAGS

WH-PH /”

how/what about?

ww TALK (231) RELATIONAL (307) EXPRESSIVE STYLE (352)

There are several explanations which can be proposed for the form-function mappings which are evidenced by these data. First, it is not surprising that questions which seek information about external facts previously unknown to the speaker would occur most frequently as questions which are formally and unambiguously marked by syntactic inversion (yes/no questions) and/or by insertion of question-markers (wh-questions). Together these constitute approximately 80% of the external questions which occurred. These findings are compatible with the predictions made by Kearsley (1976) and the conclusions reached by Sinclair and Van Gessel (1990). Sinclair and Van Gessel report that in their data “the most specific question forms”, by which they mean questions which have formal semantic markings, “are associated with referential [information] questions, . . . those questions which from a functional point of view most closely resemble the traditional conception of questions (questions concerning ‘missing knowledge’)” (1990: 940). Kearsley states that while wh-question forms are used for purposes of garnering knowledge about topics unfamiliar to speakers, yes/no questions are used for gaining information about subjects already familiar to speakers (1976: 363). We might expect, therefore, that in casual conversations between friends, such as those analyzed here, speakers would use roughly equal numbers of these

638

A. F. Freed 1 The form and .function of‘qurstions

two types of questions when asking for public and social information. Indeed, this is what occurs in these data. Recall that 43% of external questions occurred as yes/no questions and 37% were wh-questions. (Another 7% were wh-questions plus guess constructions.) Second, when questioners seek information about the immediate conversational context, one might predict that they would use declaratives and phrases with a final rising intonation since they are seeking information which is recycled from previous utterances. 65% of talk questions were of this form. Many of these questions were literally declarative utterances drawn from earlier parts of the conversation, repeated or paraphrased with a rising intonation. Third, the high correspondence between yes/no and relational questions, 66%, may be explained by the fact that these questions frequently seek simple acknowledgment from the hearer, fix attention on a point in the conversation or interactively connect the speaker and hearer. Yes/no questions are particularly well suited for this, since answers to them require little in the way of new information and are often themselves left unanswered. A number of additional points of interest emerge from delving into the mappings between form and individual functional categories. As the discussion above predicts, of the yes/no questions which sought external information, a significant proportion were specifically social information questions, e.g. A: I mean, is he, does he do the household chores too?. These represented 60% of the 164 external yes/no questions as compared to only 27% which asked for public information, e.g. Do they have good Italian food there?. In contrast, of the wh-questions which were used for external questions, an approximately equal number sought public information (47%), e.g. Sexuul orientation? What’s that mean?, and social information (49%), e.g. What are you going to take?. As suggested above, yes/no questions are often used when speakers wish to gain information about topics they are already familiar with whereas wh-questions are or have more access to, i.e., social iqformation, equally well suited to seeking public or private information. Of the 151 declaratives and phrases with final phrase rise, shown above to be predominantly used as talk questions, more were used as clur$cation questions, 56%, e.g. A: I can’t have this. B: You can’t huve this? A: I’m on this Passover kick. B: It’s still Passover?, than as confirmation questions, 41%, e.g. A: . . . there’s a lot of hostility and the director resigned ~ B: Mary resigned?. Repetition questions were quite infrequent and made up only 3% of this category. Furthermore, or the 30 tag questions used as relational questions, 28 (or 93%) were used as phatic information questions, e.g. It’s interesting, isn’t it?, and not as other types of relational questions. Similarly, on the 203 yes/no questions which occurred as relational questions, 95 or 47% were used as phatic information questions. A striking 43% of this total consisted specifically of the utterance Do you know what I mean? or Know what I mean?. Use of this question, which seemed to be idiosyncratic to a subset of the informants who

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639

participated in this study, accounted for almost half of the cases of yes/no questions used for phatic exchange in this corpus.7. Finally, wh-questions made up the largest proportion of the rhetorical questions which occurred, e.g. A: Then after a while you start to know everybody’s life story because, you know, what are you going to talk about? B: Yeah, there’s nothing to really talk about. These accounted for 48% of the 113 rhetorical questions asked. In contrast to this, Kearsley (1976) speculated that rhetorical questions most commonly occurred as tag questions. This is certainly not confirmed by the data considered for this analysis, and once again, illustrates the need for empirical confirmation of research claims. More significant than the proposed explanations for the particular findings reported on here, is the evidence they provide for the existence of form/function mappings of questions. It is evident that the speakers in this study chose particular syntactic forms more often than others depending on the pragmatic and/or social function of their questions.

5. Discussion Several important conclusions concerning the general description of questions in conversation emerge from the analysis presented above. First, in order to arrive at both the taxonomic classification of questions and the establishment of regular form/functions mappings, questions had to be identified through their syntactic and prosodic form. The approach used in this study calls into question Schegloff s (1984) argument that the syntactic form of interrogative utterances has little value for the analysis of their role in conversation. Schegloff claims that what unites questions as a linguistic class has little to do with their syntactic form but is rather a result of their placement in conversational sequences. He says, “Even where an utterance is in the linguistic form of a question, and seems to be doing questioning, the latter will not be adequately accounted for by the former. For if the question form can be used for actions other than questioning, and questioning can be accomplished by linguistic forms other than questions, then a relevant problem can be posed not only about how a question does something other than questioning, but about how it does questioning; not only about how questioning is done by nonquestion forms, but about how it gets accomplished by question forms.” (1984: 3435)

’ Of the 24 informants in this study, eight were college-age women. These eight women used the phatic question (Do) you know what I mean? 72 times; this represented 82% of the total of 88 occurrences. It is beyond the scope of this study to determine whether this usage is related to the age of these speakers, to the speech community of which they are a part, or to some other social phenomenon. For further discussion see Greenwood and Freed (1992).

640

A. F. Freed 1 The form

andfunction

of questions

There is no disagreement about the fact that questions serve a variety of purposes, or to use Schegloffs terminology, that they accomplish diverse actions in conversation. However, the problem of understanding how questions work in conversation is not resolved by disregarding their form nor by attempting to assign a prima facie function to different question types outside of their conversational context. As Geis (1989) points out, in rejecting the primacy of the interrogative form in analyzing questions, Schegloff erases part of the basic meaning of interrogatives and leaves behind nothing substantial to distinguish between questions and other types of utterances which may be identical to them in propositional content. Geis explains that we “cannot account for the s[social]-meaning of an utterance in a conversation without appealing to its Qliteral, linguistic]-meaning” (1989: 55), which in the case of a question includes both its syntactic and semantic form. This is separate from contextual information which encompasses such things as shared background knowledge, conditions on social actions, etc. (1989: 55-56). The goal, therefore, should be to describe what these utterances have in common conversationally, given that they do share well-defined syntactic and intonational properties. Furthermore, the use of a question by a speaker should not be taken as an automatic request for either a verbal reply or a non-verbal action by a hearer/ addressee. Lyons’ (1977: 755) distinction, also adopted by Kiefer (1981: 161), between “posing a question” and “asking a question of an individual”, is a useful heuristic. Kiefer states, quoting from Lyons (1977 : 755), “What seems to be required is a distinction between asking a question of someone and simply posing a question (without necessarily addressing it to someone). When we pose a question, we merely give expression to, or externalize our doubt; and we can pose questions which we do not merely expect to remain unanswered, but which we know, or believe, to be unanswerable. To ask a question of someone is both to pose the question and, in so doing, to give indication to one’s addressee that he is expected to respond by answering the question that is posed. But the indication that the addressee is expected to give an answer is not part of the question itself.” (1981: 161)

This view of questions allows us to consider a wide range of utterances as similar in nature without obliging us to manipulate our definition for cases which are otherwise difficult to explain. For example, rhetorical questions have frequently been considered pseudo-questions because answers do not follow them (see Sadock and Zwicky 1985: 180). More reasonable is the view of questions taken here, which does not assume an answer or response to be a required and/or automatic consequence of the occurrence of the question in the first place. In particular, when the question data from this corpus were examined, it became clear that while some questions elicited answers, others were followed by inappropriate responses and still others were followed by no answers at all.

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641

Questions are asked, and have informational content or expressive significance, regardless of the presence or absence of a response. In one of the conversations used for this study, a speaker interrupts a narrative of her partner, saying, I have to go to the bathroom. Where can I go to the bathroom ?. She receives no response and repeats a variation of the question later in the conversation. The second time the hearer answers, Z don’t know. The lack of response to the initial question, although interesting, does not in any way modify the informational content of the first question. Both utterances specifically ask for a particular kind of factual information. Since the goal here has been to identify the kinds of questions that speakers ask, the description had to be initially based on the informational content of the interrogative utterance itself. Researchers who analyze conversation as a rigid sequencing of particular types of utterances miss a basic principle about human verbal interaction. While it is certainly not the case that every sentence is equally appropriate or felicitous at any point in a discourse, speakers and hearers are remarkably tolerant of peculiar exchanges and are prepared to interpret a much wider range of utterance-combinations than some theories would indicate. As Levinson points out, “. . . this is predictable by Grice’s theory of implicature; any apparent conversational violation (e.g. flouting of Relevance) is likely to be treated on the assumption that the utterances involved are in fact interpretable if additional inferences are made” (1983 : 292). To assume that a question is cooperatively received only if followed by an answer is to create a false set of rules about the use of questions and the structure of conversation. Levinson argues that the occurrence in discourse of unanswered questions “undermine[s] the structural significance of the concept of an adjacency pair” (1983: 307). He states that, “strict adjacency” as suggested by the model developed by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) is “actually too strong a requirement” (1983: 304) even for question-answer sequences. We may instead assume only that answers are relevant, but not necessary, following questions (Levinson, 1983: 293). We may further assert that questions will be used by speakers for a variety of effects and that “speakers can . . . use the violation of normal rules of conduct to create special dramatic effects in communication. All this requires interlocutors to be cooperative and to share relevant knowledge and relevant contextual information” (Levelt, 1989: 44). Thus, in this study, questions were not analyzed as part of adjacency pairs. This is in large part because questions are not considered to be a priori connected to answers. (See also Sinclair and Van Gessel, 1990: 927.) Instead, it is taken for granted that questions accomplish, in one way or another, some purpose of the speaker’s, whether or not a following verbal response occurs. The presence or absence of an answer or response may help identify the type of question one is dealing with, i.e. may lead to its functional classification; but an answer does not

642

A. F. Freed 1 The form and,finclion

of questions

constitute a necessary condition for categorizing an utterance as a question in the first place. Finally, in order to arrive at an understanding of question use, the literal meaning of each individual question token was taken into account. The literal meaning, which is separate from the question’s pragmatic effect, proved to be useful in analyzing what questions have in common and was valuable for determining what they accomplish in conversation. This line of reasoning follows Hudson, Kiefer, and Geis, where the semantic meaning (Hudson, 1975: 16) propositional content (Kiefer, 1981: 162) or literal “l-meaning” (Geis, 1989: 55) is conceived of as separate from the pragmatic interpretation or illocutionary force (Hudson, 1975: 16) the “solution” or possible answer (Kiefer, 1981: 162), or the significance, or (social) “s-meaning” (Geis, 1989: 55) of the question. This separation allows us to analyze the meaning of a question utterance without simultaneously attempting an interpretation of the conversational or pragmatic effect of the utterance. The approach is based on the belief that a hearer’s understanding of a question has to do with the rules of the language as well as with rules for verbal interaction, knowledge of the social setting, etc., although the latter is not part of the meaning of the utterance itself. The function of a question, that is, the conversational, pragmatic, or social use to which questions are put by speakers in conversations is, therefore, seen as dependent on the interactive context in which it occurs. For this, Geis’ (1989) view of speech act theory as belonging to social theory is particularly helpful. As stated above, this view allows us to recognize the importance of what is literally said, i.e. the meaning of the utterance itself, as separate from the conversational or social meaning or function associated with the utterance. It further separates this social/conversational function from the utterance by excluding it as a property of the utterance, and instead requires that the interpretation be dependent on the conversational context in which it occurs (1989: 55556). By separating these two, it becomes clear that the actions accomplished by speakers in the uttering of particular sentences are not properties of the sentences themselves, but of the situations in which the sentences are used. The findings reported in this work underscore several theoretical points about the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring speech. (1) The literal the informational content of an meaning of what is said, in particular, utterance as well as the form in which it is uttered, should be carefully considered; this literal meaning, while separate from the pragmatic and/or social meaning of the utterance, is valuable for determining what the utterance accomplishes in conversation. (2) Important connections between form and function can be uncovered by analyzing both the form and the function of utterances and then considering their interaction in discourse. We see in particular that there are notable correspondences between the forms of

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questions and the purposes for which they are used in the informal dyadic conversations analyzed for this study.

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