‘What else did we do’. Interrogatives in (learner) interviewee speech
(2014) ICAME35 — Location: University of Nottingham (Great Britain) (30.April.2014)
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- Abstract
- The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language. However informal these interviews may be, they do not share two of Clark’s (1996) typical features of face-to-face conversation, namely self-determination and self-expression. While the free exchange of turns is a fundamental organising factor of conversations, in interviews the participants do not determine for themselves what actions to take when. Instead of being ‘locally managed’ as in conversations (Lazaraton 1992), the turn-taking system is pre-specified: interviews are organised according to a question-answer format. Besides taking actions as themselves (Clarke’s self-expression) the participants in an interview also take actions as ‘interviewer’ or ‘interviewee’. As Fiksdal (1990) points out, the participants have rights and obligations as interviewer or interviewee: the interviewer has the right and obligation to ask questions and the interviewee has the obligation to answer these questions. This paper sets out to explore the extent to which interrogative clauses and more specifically Wh-questions and yes/no-questions (Biber et al 1999) are used by the learners in the various subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010) in spite of the fixed turn-taking format. The Concord tool in WordSmith Tools 4.0 (Scott 2008) is used to retrieve the instances of wh-words and primary and secondary auxiliaries from the interviewee turns of all the subcorpora on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (spoken productions by learners from eleven mother tongue backgrounds: Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Swedish). The automatic retrieval is followed by careful analysis of the concordances to identify the Wh-questions and yes/no-questions in the data. The various corpora used contain between 60,000 and 100,000 words of interviewee speech and the interviews all follow the same set pattern. The use of Wh-questions and yes/no-questions is also investigated in a comparable corpus of informal interviews with native speakers of English, i.e. the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC). The focus of the study is more specifically on the discourse/pragmatic functions of questions uncovered in the data: e.g. genuine questions to the interviewers, direct reported questions, rhetorical questions which enable speakers to carry on talking while thinking about what to say next (what else did we do) and/or to establish ‘rapport’ with the interlocutor (do you know what I mean), direct appeals for assistance (how do you say that; cf. communication strategies, Tarone et al. 1983. The interviewer variables recorded in the LINDSEI database (especially status, mother tongue and knowledge of other foreign languages) are also taken into consideration in the analysis of the discourse/pragmatic functions of the questions under study as they may be seen to affect the frequency of the type of questions used.
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De Cock, S. (2014). ‘What else did we do’. Interrogatives in (learner) interviewee speech. ICAME35, University of Nottingham (Great Britain). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/93050