106 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
Finally, in (44), X assumes that the person on the other end of the line
is Henry and he invites the addressee to confirm his assumption. X’s utterance
is what Quirk et al. would describe as a positively biased ‘yes/no question’.
However, as we can see, there are no assertive forms like ‘someone’ or
‘already’ in the utterance. The positive orientation is achieved by making
‘you’ prominent. Even when an assertive form like ‘someone’ is used, the
utterance is not necessarily positively orientated. For example, the utterance
‘Did someone CALL last night?’ with the prominence on ‘call’ is not positively
orientated. It is equivalent to ‘Did anyone CALL last night?’. Both of them
mean ‘Was there a caller?’. Unless ‘someone’ is prominent the utterance is
not positively orientated and ‘someone’ is not contrastive to ‘anyone’. (I’m
grateful to David Brazil for pointing this out to me.) In other words, prosodic
features like prominence are important factors in determining what kind of
Elicitation an utterance realizes.
In all of the above utterances the prospected response is confirmation.
The addressee can of course respond by a disconfirmation, but the response
will be contrary to the expectation and is likely to be spoken in contrastive
high key. It should be noted, however, that sometimes we do find a confirmation
in response to an Elicit:confirm spoken in high key.
47 (C:4:28)
G: //p i MEAN they //r+ ISn’t the LION rock TUNnel //
//r+ a tunnel through a MOUNtain //
→ S: //p YEAH // that’s probably the closest survival tunnel for us.
In (47), ‘yeah’ confirms the speaker’s assumption and yet it is spoken in
high key. This is because although internationally a mid key is used to
indicate that the response accords with the speaker’s expectation, the addressee
may choose to use a high key for emphatic purpose or in a particular
context to indicate surprise, delight or annoyance (see Coulthard and Brazil,
this volume, Chapter 3). In this case, S’s use of a high key conveys an
additional meaning which is paraphrasable as ‘yes, that’s right, I hadn’t
thought of that before’.
Similarly, a disconfirmation can be spoken in mid key which is normally
used to indicate confirmation or agreement. The following piece of data is
an example.
48 (BCET:A:4)
C: //p was THIS caroline SPENce //
→ A: //p NO //p this is a FRIEND of caroline spence //
In (48), ‘no’ disconfirms C’s assumption that A was talking about Caroline
Spence. Yet, it is spoken in mid key. This can be explained by social
considerations. By choosing mid key, the speaker is presenting his response
as though it is not contrastive to the speaker’s expectation, hence making
the response less face-threatening and socially more acceptable.