110 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
the interrogative form whereas in the latter, the term ‘question’ refers to
the discourse function; it also avoids the lumping together of utterances
which have different discourse consequences such as the characterization
of ‘questions’ as ‘requests’.
NOTES
1 The analysis of questions in Quirk et al. (1985) is basically the same as that in
Quirk et al. (1972).
2 The conversational data used here consist of face-to-face and telephone conversations
between native speakers of English. B stands for telephone conversations and C
stands for face-to-face conversations. (BCET) stands for Birmingham Collection
of English Texts. I would like to thank the English Department, University of
Birmingham, for allowing me to use their data.
The following transcription notations are used: // marks a tone unit boundary; /
marks overlapping utterances; CAPITALS mark PROminent SYLLables.
3 In Tsui (1987), I labelled this subcategory ‘Elicit:supply’. I have changed it to
Elicit:inform to bring it into line with the other 5 subcategories in which the
label signifies the kind of response prospected by the Elicitation.
‘A functional description of questions’ is a substantially modified version
of ‘On elicitations’, first published in Coulthard (1987a) Discussing Discourse,
80–106.