Verbless questions in oral monologic discourse
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Antonina Bondarenko
Abstract
Recent studies of written corpora have shown that the variation between the presence and the absence of the verb is a particularly sensitive issue for questions in English. Extending the analysis to oral monologic discourse, this paper explores the form and discourse function of verbless questions in a corpus of TED Talks. The results show a proportion of verbless questions to verbless sentences that is typical of dialogical written discourse, suggesting that TED Talks represent a speaker-controlled dialogically motivated type of discourse. The observed correlation with antecedent-based ellipsis suggests that verbless questions involve stronger speaker commitment and a lighter cognitive load on the addressee in terms of pragmatic implicature than verbless sentences. Verbless questions also tend to be marked solely by intonation, be immediately answered by the speaker, and assume interlocutive intent.
Funding source: IdEx Université de Paris: Émergence en Recherche
Award Identifier / Grant number: IDEX UP 2021-I-053
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Loïc Liégois, Agnès Celle, Amália Mendes, and the “Transmission of knowledge through questions” project team. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (21–25 August 2024, University of Helsinki, Finland). I wish thank the organizers of this conference and the special workshop, as well as the members of the audience for their comments and questions. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this paper. Financial support for this study was provided through the IDEX UP 2021-I-053 grant awarded to Agnès Celle (PI).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Advances in research on questions in monologic discourse: introduction to the special issue on questions in monologic discourse
- Questions in monological discourse in the Estonian parliament
- Three strategies for Socratic inquisitiveness in reflective questions
- The argumentative functions of strategic questions in Portuguese parliamentary speeches
- Gestural strategies in questions during monological discourse
- Tag questions in English and Portuguese monologues: types, features, and functions
- Japanese and French specificational sentences with left-dislocation and the questions they induce
- Question sequences in English TED Talks
- Verbless questions in oral monologic discourse
- Questions in monologues: an analysis grounded on ISO
- Questions in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank and the development of an annotation scheme
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Advances in research on questions in monologic discourse: introduction to the special issue on questions in monologic discourse
- Questions in monological discourse in the Estonian parliament
- Three strategies for Socratic inquisitiveness in reflective questions
- The argumentative functions of strategic questions in Portuguese parliamentary speeches
- Gestural strategies in questions during monological discourse
- Tag questions in English and Portuguese monologues: types, features, and functions
- Japanese and French specificational sentences with left-dislocation and the questions they induce
- Question sequences in English TED Talks
- Verbless questions in oral monologic discourse
- Questions in monologues: an analysis grounded on ISO
- Questions in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank and the development of an annotation scheme
