Declarative questions in Polish student conversations

Abstract

This paper focuses on the contextual factors influencing the status of declarative polar (information seeking) questions in Polish. The study is based on the two tailor-made corpora of Polish student conversations, specially collected in Kraków and Krosno from 2015 to 2017, out of which 28 examples of declaratives are analysed (out of 200 identified in the corpora). Polish question research tradition, contrary to English, does not recognize the notion of a declarative question, but it does recognize the issue in other terms. Declarative questions in Polish conversation corpora are here defined as statements requesting or demanding some information from the hearer (B-events in Labov's terminology), who actually responds or reacts to them, usually cued by rising intonation (with notable exceptions of e.g. ironic declaratives), and some emotive “bias” (rhetoric, irony, humour etc.); they are analysed in the article in accordance to the cognitive linguistic methodology, involving language-thought-communication continuum, advanced by Gerard Steen, broadly applied throughout this special issue. Major conventional markers (such as a/i and ale) occurring with declaratives are identified and analysed, followed by more extended, contextual usages (referred to here, as in the whole special issue, as ‘deliberate’, following Steen's approach to metaphors). Among the markers attention is also paid to various combinations of forms, including particle sequences and question clusters, all characteristic of Polish conversational declaratives. The analysis draws attention to the functions of declaratives, including the broad repair function established in other languages, as well rhetorical usages of declaratives (esp. repetitive, emphatic or ironic), which tend to be the non-canonical A, AB or D-events, typical of Polish communication style.