94 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
6 (B:C:A:1:2)
H: I I don’t know, see, he has a son at, was in the school last
year ah does he have to re-apply?
X: Ah yes, I think so.
→H: So we’ll have to fill out one of those forms again.
X: Yes.
H is not telling X that he has to fill out a form but asking for confirmation.
As Brazil (1985) points out, in saying ‘you prefer that one’ with a proclaiming
(i.e. falling) tone and mid-termination, the speaker is not likely to be telling
the hearer about his preference but rather asking him to respond to the tentative
assertion. Similarly, the utterance ‘John prefers that one’, spoken with a falling
tone in a situation where the addressee is privy to John’s preference functions
as a ‘question’. Labov and Fanshel have made similar observations. They
state that if the speaker makes a statement about a B-event with a falling
intonation (which they call declarative intonation) then it is heard as a request
for confirmation. This is supported by their findings in a series of interviews:
negative responses to the declarative question ‘And you never called the
police’ were in the form of a simple ‘No’ whereas positive responses required
some indication of surprise as well, such as ‘Oh yes, I called them’ (1977:101).
The requirement of an indication of surprise for positive responses shows that
they are contrary to the expectation of the declarative question.
Thirdly, declarative questions can also function as information questions
in certain contexts and the answer expected is a supply of information.
Consider the following example given by Brazil:
7 (Brazil 1985:159)
Doctor: //p where do you GET this pain //
Patient: //p in my HEAD //
→Doctor: //p you GET it in your HEAD //
As is evident from the discourse context, in the arrowed utterance, the
doctor is not so much asking the patient to confirm but rather, as Brazil
points out, is ‘asking for greater precision—a recycling of the question, so
to speak, by behaving as though the patient had not yet selected a response,
and leading perhaps to “Yes. Behind my eyes”’ (1985:159).
Wh-questions
The second class of questions is wh-questions, which are information-seeking
and seem to be the least problematic category. They are realized by wh-
words, usually spoken with falling intonation and the answer expected is
the missing piece of information denoted by the wh-word. They are considered
to constitute a category distinctly different from questions seeking neutral
polarity and questions seeking confirmation. However, things are not quite
so simple; consider the following wh-questions: