102 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
I shall now attempt to make a classification of ‘Elicitations’ according to
the different responses prospected.
SUBCATEGORIES OF ELICITATION
Elicit:inform^3
Let us start with the kind of Elicitation which invites the addressee to
supply a piece of information. Consider the following pieces of data.
31 (B:A:A:2:1)
→ H: What time will you be finished?
X: Lecture finishes at about quarter past twelve.
32 (B:E:A:4:3)
→ X: Are you a literature section/or a language studies.
H: No no I’m I’m not I’m language side, but
I would like to see the two sides bridged myself.
33 (B:B:A:3)
→ B: Do you do you have wheels?
A: Yes, I drive, it’s Donald’s car.
34 (Schegloff 1972:107)
→ A: I don’t know just where the—uh—this address/is.
B: Well, where do—which part of the town do you live.
A: I live at four ten east Lowden.
B: Well, you don’t live very far from me.
35 (B:C:B:1:9)
E: D’you have an O.U.P. here, or you haven’t got it?
F: No, ah I asked them, they haven’t got it, so I got it from New York.
→ E: You have to get it from New York huh?
F: Yeah just write, just write them a letter, they’ll probably send it by
air mail too, for free.
For (31), it will be generally agreed that H’s utterance asks for a piece of
missing information. X’s utterance in (32) is similar to H’s utterance in
(31) in that it also invites the addressee to supply a piece of information,
except that the answer prospected here is one of the alternatives supplied.
B’s utterance in (33) is what Quirk et al. refer to as a ‘neutral polarity
yes/no question’ in which the speaker does not have any assumptions as
to whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. As mentioned before, although the
prospected answers to this kind of utterance are usually in the form of
‘yes’ or ‘no’, they do not and cannot possibly realize a confirmation or
disconfirmation because there is no speaker assumption to confirm or
disconfirm. They are in fact the missing information that the speaker seeks.
A’s utterance in (34) is declarative in form. However, we can see that A