Varieties of Questions in English Conversation

Download or read book Varieties of Questions in English Conversation written by Elizabeth G. Weber and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines relations which hold between morphosyntactic form and communicative function in discourse by examining form-function correlations of noninterrogative questions in ordinary English conversation. So-called nontypical declarative and nonclausal questions are identified functionally. The role morphosyntax plays in the production and interpretation of these forms as doing questioning is then considered. Speakers are shown to use specific patterns of morphosyntactic marking to enable recipients to interpret noninterrogatives as functional questions. Explanations for morphosyntactic patterns found in the data are stated in terms of discourse use.