| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1994: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this study is to examine how questions work in aktual discourse. Recent studies in speech act theory regard question and answer as a set, which construct the minimal unit of speech. Although the question and the answer belongs to a defferent speaker, the notion of dialog enables to treat them together. The question is often seen as a request for information. The speaker gives instruction with the form of question, which sort of information he needs. Yes-no questions offer two choices, and affirmative and a negative. The chices of wh-questions are the set of entities, which class is indicated by interrogative pronouns.
In aktual communication questions show only partially these syntactic patterns. Questionmarkers are used for aims except for asking. Interrogatives can be used even for answering a question.
Material for analysis was a 90 minute discussion about the life in Japan, which has been recorded 1994 at the Hokkaido University. Participants were five nativespeakers of german language, who has been living in Sapporo for several years. Data obtained by refer to the "Freiburger Korpus"was useful to support the analysis.
Expressions like "irgend so", "oder so", "glaub ich", which are called "hedge"byGeorge Lakoff show a special functionin questions. The question bekomesfuzzy by cooccurrence with hedges.Thatmeans, that the question loses itscharacter as a request for information.On the other hand the hearer gets withits fuzziness more freedom in his answer, what is also in the interest of the speaker. The study shall be continued, since only a part of the discussionhas been analyzed yet.
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