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Abstract In this study, the relationship between form and function of questionsin Mandarin conversation is investigated in order to see how communicative function motivates linguistic form. The corpus used for this study is composed of 31 spontaneous conversations for a total of 189 minutes. Each question token is classified in terms of its grammatical form and communicative function. From the perspective of grammatical form, questions are first grouped into clausal and nonclausal and each separately further classified into question- word questions, disjunctive questions, sentence-final particle questions, independent particle questions, A-not-A questions, Tag questionsand declarative questions. Declarative questions and some nonclausal questions are particularly interesting in that recipients are able to recognize them as questions despite the fact that they lack an overt interrogative form. Factors like lexical and morphosyntactic markings,the accessibility of information and the sequence of speakership and their interaction have been shown to be involved. Some declarative questions and nonclausal questions are ''marked'' by question indicators. As to the ''unmarked'' questions, some are ''truly plain'' questions whereas others arenext-turn repair initiators (NTRI''s). Since question indicators canalso be used in conjunction with other linguistic elements to realizecommunicative functions other than questions, they alone are not sufficient to trigger the interpretation of declarative and nonclausal questions. For both ''marked'' and ''unmarked'' declarative as well as nonclausal questions, the decisive factors have been shown to be the information status of the participants and the sequential position of the utterance. From the perspective of communicative meaning, four general categories are distinguished: external questions, talk questions, relational questions and expressive questions. These four question functions can be arranged along a continuum. The continuum from left to right ranges from more uncertain to less uncertain in terms of speaker''s degree of certainty, or from information seeking to information conveying in terms of the speaker''s communicative goal. The continuum also shows that questions have a way ofmoving from seeking objective, referential information towards expressing more subjective, speaker-based attitudes and points of view. Therefore, the mechanism of subjectification or speaker-involvement seems to be working in the area of grammatical constructions. Results of the analysis display a many-to-many relationship between the form and function of questions in Mandarin conversation. However, there is an unmistakable correlation between form and function. Speakers tend to use question-word questions, A-not-A questions and questions with particle ma to seek external information, declarative questions, tag questions and questions with particles other than ma to seek information about discourse itself, questions with sentence-final particles and A-not-A quest to seek verbal relationship, and question-word questions and tag questions for expressive purposes. These and other demonstrate that the linguistic forms of questions are functionally motivated.
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