Questions and responses in Yéliˆ Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island  

Oleh:

Levinson, Stephen C.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 42 no. 10 (Oct. 2010), page 2741–2755.
Topik: Papuan languages Questions Visual signals Interaction Prosody Wh-movement
Fulltext: Levinson_S.C.pdf (1.04MB)

Isi artikel

A corpus of 350 naturally-occurring questions in videotaped interaction shows that questions and their responses in Yéliˆ Dnye (the Papuan language of Rossel Island) both conform to clear universal expectations but also have a number of language-specific peculiarities. They conform in that polar and wh-questions are unrelated in form, whquestions have the usual sort of special forms, and responses show the same priorities as in other languages (for fast cooperative, adequate answers). But, less expected perhaps, Yéliˆ Dnye polarquestions (excepting tags) areunmarked in bothmorphosyntaxand prosody, and the responses include conventional facial expressions, conforming to the propositional response system type (so that assent to ‘He didn’t come?’ means ‘no, he didn’t’). These visual signals are facilitated by high levels of mutual gaze making rapid early responses possible. Tags can occur with non-interrogative illocutionary forces, and could be held to perform speech acts of their own. Wh-questions utilize about a dozen wh-forms, which are only optionally fronted, and there are some interesting specializations of forms (e.g. ‘who’ for any named entities other than places). Most questions of all types are genuinely information seeking, with 27% (mostly tags) seeking confirmation, 19% requesting repair.

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