100 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Secondly, according to Lyons’s characterization of ‘questions’, it is difficult
to see how rhetorical questions can be considered a kind of ‘question’.
Consider the following example,
29 (B:H:B:5:5)
H and M are talking to a colleague who just joined the department.
H: But I think he might be threat—a threat to the very insecure
Chinese folk around here.
→ M: Who cares?
H: And ah that that sh-
M’s utterance ‘Who cares?’ is commonly referred to as a rhetorical question.
But it does not express doubt, nor does it imply that M does not know the
answer to the question. It is a remark on H’s opinion that the new colleague
will be a threat to his Chinese colleagues. This is supported by the fact that
after M’s remark, H does not supply an answer but rather continues to
express his opinion.
What Lyons, as well as Quirk et al., seems to be doing is trying to offer
a description which takes into account both syntactic form and discourse
function. Therefore, different and inconsistent criteria are used in the identification
and classification of ‘questions’. The result is that the category of ‘question’
becomes a half-way house between a syntactic category and a discourse
category. As Anthony points out:
A definition which attempts to cover utterances as syntactically and functionally
disparate as those which we intuitively label questions necessarily reduces
itself to near-vacuity.
(1974:6, quoted in Stenström 1984)‘QUESTION’ AS ‘REQUEST’
Let us now turn to a characterization of ‘questions’ which moves completely
away from syntactic form to function—the characterization of ‘questions’
as ‘requests’ and ‘directives’. ‘Questions’ have been characterized by some
as ‘requests’ which have the purpose of eliciting information (see, for example,
Katz 1972, 1977, Katz and Postal 1964, Gordon and Lakoff 1975, Labov
and Fanshel 1977). It has been suggested by Postal, G. Lakoff, Ross and
others that the logical form of ‘questions’ should be REQUEST (a, b, TELL
(b, a, S) ) and not ASK (a, b, S); ‘a’ being the speaker and ‘b’ the addressee.
In other words, it should be ‘I request that you tell me’ instead of ‘I ask
you’. ‘Questions’ have also been characterized by others as a kind of ‘directive’
on the ground that a ‘directive’ is an instruction to perform something and
‘questions’ are instructions to make a verbal performance. For example,
according to Burton (1980) ‘Tell me your name’ is a ‘directive’ to make a
verbal performance, and according to J.Willis (1981), a ‘question’ in which
a student is instructed to say something is characterized as ‘Direct:verbal’.