Why yes/no questions trigger expanded answers in sociolinguistic interviews: an application of Mey’s Pragmeme theory
(2016) The Linguistic Society of Belgium 2016 Day — Location: Université catholique de Louvain (13.May.2016)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- The sociolinguistic interview uses different kinds of questions, in terms of their topics and their pragmatic categorisation. This paper focuses specifically on the analysis of polar questions and their answers. Some manuals recommend not using them while interviewing, since they might elicit a bare yes/no answer, defeating the purpose of the sociolinguistic interview of collecting long speech sequences (Tagliamonte 2006: 41). Interestingly enough, the fact is that some of the most famous sociolinguistic questions are in a yes/no form, such as Labov’s danger of death (literally, “Were you ever in a situation where you were in serious danger of getting killed?”, in Labov 1984: 33). Previous research has proved that apart from asking confirmation, polar questions are often doing something else, such as offering, requesting, or requiring some elaboration on the yes/no element, among others (Schegloff 2007, Raymond 2013). This double nature is understood by the speakers, who usually answer those questions with a confirmation (through a polar element) and an expansion of it (like a justification or an acceptance, depending on the second action achieved by the yes/no questions) (Steensig and Heinemann 2013). The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the pragmatic nature of expanded polar questions and their answers by applying the concept of pragmeme (Mey 2001, Allan 2010). Mey defines the pragmeme (a unit in the pragmatic level) as “a general situational prototype, capable of being executed in the situation” (2001: 221). This prototypical nature will be operationalized in this paper through an analysis in terms of frequencies of use, in particular, by investigating what are the most frequent answers to polar questions in the context of a sociolinguistic interview, as well as the possible influence of features of the context, like the kind of yes/no question, the polarity of the question or the structure of the answer. The data are extracted from a Spanish sociolinguistic corpus (MadSex) (Pizarro Pedraza, 2013). The results show that, rather than a single polar element, most of the interviewees give an expanded polar answer, although the place of this expansion and the very presence or absence of an initial polar element may vary. The paper argues that the “expanded polar answer” can be considered as an interactional pragmeme with a dyadic nature. Due to the conventional common scene (Rancière 1995, in Mey 2001) of the interview itself, the pragmeme is made relevant by the requirements of the situation, where the interviewee is supposed to provide information. The pragmeme presents four variants, or allopracts, more or less central in the category according to the presence of certain formal elements. The paper concludes by analysing the methodological implications for the practice of the sociolinguistic interview.
- Affiliations
Citations
Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2016). Why yes/no questions trigger expanded answers in sociolinguistic interviews: an application of Mey’s Pragmeme theory. The Linguistic Society of Belgium 2016 Day, Université catholique de Louvain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185600