|
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.
|