Volume 70, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Perspectives on questions, answers, and information structuring, Issue Editors: M.M.Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest and Helle Metslang

Starting from a critical evaluation of the Question-Answer (Q-A) test that has been used by many theoreticians for establishing the linguistic category of Rheme/Focus, this collective chapter, a by-product of our larger CNRS-project about Information Structuring and Typology (ISTY) introduces a methodology based on a Minimal Communicative Utterance (MCU – often an Answer) and its extensions – Binary Strategy 1 (Theme-Rheme) and Binary Strategy 2 (Rheme-Mneme) as dialogic information structuring (IS) constructions. Section 2 reviews the presentation of Polar and Referent Qs and their Answers in the grammars of several European languages – Finno-Ugric (Estonian, Finnish, Sami) and Indo-European (French, Swedish) – and emphasizes the necessity to take into account discourse typology. Section 3 investigates the formal and semantic correlations of Q-A pairs taken from authentic corpora in various dialogue situations (orally transmitted Northern Sami and its recent written variants, Estonian conversations, French political debates). Section 4 is dedicated to a survey of Qs and As in three Southeast-Asian languages (Mandarin Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese), and a comparison of discourse particles as IS devices in the two groups of languages. The general conclusion suggests new approaches to some unsolved research questions (prosody, “theme-prominence”, interaction of syntax and IS structures).

On the basis of a set of discourse completion tasks, forms of making requests and asking for information in various contexts in five languages with various mutual contacts and areal affiliations are investigated. The study shows what young Estonian, Finnish, French, Lithuanian and Russian speakers consider to be appropriate forms of making requests in various contexts. Many similarities among these languages were found, but also some systematic cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences. The effects of language contacts can be seen most clearly in the “intermediate” positioning of Estonian and Lithuanian, between French and Finnish on one side and Russian on the other, along many of the parameters investigated.

On the basis of present and past developments concerning polar question markers in Estonian and other languages in the Circum-Baltic area, the main sources of interrogative markers are presented: (1) coordination markers: disjunctive, conjunctive and adversative coordination; (2) subordination markers, the source of which is the subordinating conjunction in the case of insubordination of the subordinate clause; (3) epistemic markers, which arise from particles expressing epistemic modality; (4) pronominal markers, which arise from interrogative pronouns and proadverbs in tag questions. Question particles have developed from these same sources in many other languages as well. Typical of the Circum-Baltic languages are disjunctive and conjunctive particles located on the sentence periphery.

This article describes the relationships between epistemic stance, social actions and form variants of polar questions in Estonian institutional information-seeking dialogues and compares the results with ordinary conversation in English, Dutch, and Danish. Estonian and English use a polarized system where the unknowing stance is formulated by particles and/or inversion, and knowing stance by declaratives and sentence-final markers. Dutch and Danish use an asymmetrical system where unknowing stance uses an inversion and knowing stance uses frequently all question formats. Information-seeking dialogues contain a large number of questions used to establish resources necessary to implement the second-pair-part of the adjacency pair in the interaction.