Questions-Contingent Queries-Echo Questions: The Forms and Functions of Interrogations in Spoken German

A category of responsive questions (Nachfragen), ie, questions related to an interlocutor's immediately preceding discourse, is defined to comprise inter alia clarification requests, requests for supplementary information, & alternative questions; in this framework, echo questions are treated as a special case of responsive questions. A comprehensive description of the forms & functions of responsive questions in German is based on corpora of informal conversations at private gatherings & over the telephone, university classroom & advisory discussions, & a variety of experimentally elicited conversation types. Results indicate that a relatively high % of elliptical formulations is found across all types of responsive questions; it is suggested that a possible motivation for ellipsis may be the frequent function of responsive questions to initiate converstional repair, for which a rapid interposition into the interlocutor's speech stream is optimal. Two central functional parameters of responsive questions are established: (1) focusing, including delimitation of problematic discourse segments & indications of content vs expression; & (2) interrogation, including the signalling of an information deficit, initiation of a conversational turn, & determination of the following answer. 127 References. Adapted from the source document