98 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
26 (Mandarin Chinese)
A:na dien ying hau kàn má? (Is that film good?)
B: (a) hau kàn (good)
(b) bù hau kàn (not good)
Indeed, in Mandarin Chinese, yes/no questions are often presented in
alternative form. It is linguo-centric and even misleading to call these
questions ‘yes/no questions’. (26), for example, would often occur as ‘na
dien ying hau bù hau kàn?’ (Is that film good or not good?) The expected
answers to both forms are the same: ‘hau kàn’ (good) or ‘bù hau kàn’
(not good).
We may conclude by saying that in terms of expected answer, alternative
questions do not constitute a separate category but rather belong to the
category of information-seeking questions.
Exclamatory questions
Finally, I wish to discuss briefly what Quirk et al. call ‘exclamatory questions’
which are considered a minor type of question. Exclamatory questions are
considered to function like exclamations although they have the form of
a question. They can take the form of a negative polar question with a
final falling instead of rising tone, such as ‘Hasn’t she !’ and
‘Wasn’t it a marvellous !’ or they can take the form of a positive
polar question, also with a falling intonation, such as ‘Am I !’,
‘Did he look !’ Quirk et al. point out that the first form invites
the addressee’s agreement. This suggests that the answer expected would
be the same as questions which seek agreement with the speaker’s assumption
or belief, for example, ‘She has grown, she ?’. Hence the former
belongs to the same category as the latter. As for the second form of
exclamatory question, the expected answer is more often an acknowledgement
than an agreement. This is true for exclamatory questions such as ‘Am I
!’ where the experience is entirely personal and therefore can
only be acknowledged; but it is also true for questions like ‘Did he look
!’ which are often responded to by an acknowledgement such
as ‘oh he’. Here we can see that exclamatory questions which elicit
agreement in fact belong to the same category as tag questions which
elicit agreement, and those which elicit an acknowledgement belong to an
entirely different category of utterance.
Form versus communicative choice
From the above discussion, it can be seen that the characterization and
classification of ‘questions’ proposed by Quirk et al. is very unsatisfactory.
Although they claim that their classification is made according to the response
expected, the above discussion reveals that very often precedence is given