Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

A functional description of questions 101

While this kind of characterization is superior to that of Lyons and Quirk
et al. in that it does not confuse form and function, it is not without problems.
Sadock (1974) points out that it is wrong to say that all ‘questions’ are
to be represented as ‘requests’, specifically ‘requests for information’. He
provides the following evidence to support his argument: requests can take
sentence adverbial ‘please’ but there are many types of questions that can
be used as indirect requests with which ‘please’ cannot occur. For example,

• ‘Don’t you think you should please take out the garbage?’; true questions
  allow the pre-tag ‘tell me’ but requests do not, for example, ‘Tell me, take
  out the garbage, will you?’; and so on (p. 90). Lyons (1977) points out that
  questions are not a kind of request because ‘No’ in response to yes/no
  questions such as ‘Is the door open?’ is an answer to the question whereas
  ‘No’ to ‘Open the door please’ is refusing to do what is requested.
  To Sadock’s and Lyons’s arguments, I wish to add that there is a crucial
  difference between the two, which is that utterances referred to as ‘questions’
  elicit or prospect a very different response from requests. A question elicits
  an obligatory verbal response and the interaction between the speaker and
  the addressee is completed entirely at the verbal level. Even when the response
  is non-verbal, it is merely a surrogate of the verbal response. For example:

30 A: Are you going home?
B: (shakes head)

B’s non-verbal response here is a surrogate of the verbal response ‘no’. A
request, however, elicits an obligatory non-verbal response with perhaps an
accompanying verbal response and the interaction is completed at the non-
verbal level. In other words, ‘questions’ have a different discourse function
or consequence from ‘requests’ and therefore they should not be subsumed
under the latter (see also Stubbs 1983:75).
Since the category ‘question’ is vague and ill-defined and cannot be
subsumed under either ‘requests’ or ‘directives’, I propose to call those
utterances which elicit solely a verbal response ‘Elicitations’.

ELICITATIONS

The term ‘Elicitation’ is first introduced by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975)
to describe utterances in the classroom which elicit a verbal response. They
write,

An elicitation is an act the function of which is to request a linguistic

response—linguistic, although the response may be a non-verbal surrogate

such as a nod or raised hand.

(1975:28)

The term ‘Elicitation’ is used here as a discourse category to describe any
utterance, both inside and and outside the classroom, which functions to
elicit an obligatory verbal response or its non-verbal surrogate.