96 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Secondly, comparing (12) and (13) we can see that the ‘information’
supplied in B’s utterance in exchange (12) is negotiable whereas that in
exchange (13) is not. In the former, A may not accept the time specified by
B, in which case further exchanges will be produced until a time acceptable
to both is settled upon, as we can see in the following piece of data:
16 (B:B:B:6:2)
X: When are we going to get together?
H: Anytime. How about tonight?
X: Well, I, I, (pause) I can’t get together until um maybe
Sunday.
H: Alright, Sunday.
H’s suggestion of ‘tonight’ as a time for meeting is not accepted. A further
exchange results in which H and X agree to meet up on Sunday.
The above discussion suggests that wh-questions can realize various functions
and that it is therefore doubtful whether wh-questions constitute a single
class.
Alternative questions
The third class of questions proposed by Quirk et al. is alternative questions.
According to them, there are two types of alternative question: the first type
resembles a yes/no question and the second a wh-question. For example:
17 Would you like , or?
18 Which ice cream would you , , or
?
The first type is said to differ from a yes/no question only in intonation (my
emphasis). Instead of the final rising tone, it contains a separate nucleus for
each alternative, that is, there is a rise on each item except for the last one
where a fall occurs, indicating that the list is complete (1985:823). The
second type is a compound question: a wh-question followed by an elliptical
alternative question. Its ‘full’ form is something like the following:
19 Which ice cream would you? Would you like ,
or?
There are two points that I wish to raise here: firstly, it is true that alternative
questions have at least two different syntactic forms, but do they realize two
different categories of questions in terms of the expected answer? Secondly,
is it justified to establish alternative questions as a third category? In other
words, do they constitute a class of question distinctly different from yes/
no and wh-questions?
To address the first point, let us look at the answer expected to (17) and
(18). For both, the expected answer is one of the three stated choices. In other
words, classified in terms of prospected answer, they belong to the same type