‘You’ve a daughter yourself?’: a corpus-based look at lexico-grammatical choices and pragmatic effects in question forms in an Irish radio phone-in (Pre-published version)

Abstract

Questions are widely studied especially in institutional contexts where a pervasion of questions is characteristic of such genres, for example political interviews, doctor-patient exchanges, courtroom interactions, and teacherpupil exchanges. The speaker who has professional/occupational status normally controls the development of the discourse through questioning (see Coulthard and Ashby 1975; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Blum-Kulka 1983; Drew 1985; Fisher and Groce 1990; Heritage and Greatbatch 1991 among many others). In other words, the doctor, the barrister, the interviewer and the teacher, respectively, decide whether to initiate an exchange, when to initiate it and with whom. Atkinson and Drew (1979) coined the term ‘turn-type pre-allocation’, which means that participants in institutional discourse, on entering an institutional setting, are normatively constrained in the types of turns they may take according to their particular institutional roles. As Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) tell us, this format typically involves chains of question-answer sequences, in which the institutional figure asks the questions and the witness, pupil or interviewee is expected to provide the answers. This format is pre-established and formative rules operate which means that participants can be constrained to stay within the boundaries of the question-answer framework. This is in contrast to casual conversation where roles are not restricted to those of questioner and answerer, and where the type and order of turns in a given interaction may vary freely (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998).