Echo questions in English conversational discourse: structural-semantic, cognitive-communicative, and functional characteristics

Abstract

The article focuses on echo questions, common in English conversational discourse, presenting their structural-semantic, cognitive-communicative, and functional characteristics from the perspective of cognitive-discursive research paradigm. The language material under analysis (13,938 echo questions in discourse contexts) has been selected from British and American prose of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as 92 feature films. In the study, echo questions are identified on the basis of semantic and/or structural relation to the preceding utterance (stimulus), manifested as its full, partial or paraphrased repetition. Structural and semantic differences from the stimulus are viewed as operation of the syntactic processes of complication and compression, which may be combined with the realization of actualizing, qualifying, and social modus categories. Cognitive-communicative characteristics of echo questions encompass their role in building/updating a mental context model of the communicative situation, repairing communicative failures and restoring discourse coherence, verbalizing mental processes operating during comprehension of the interlocutor's utterance (sensation, perception, thinking, memory, attention) and emotions. Functioning of echo questions, regulated by the mental context model of the communicative situation, involves performing speech acts, both direct (quesitives) and indirect (directives, expressives, metacommunicatives, constatives, and commissives), as well as realizing a number of communicative strategies (information-cognitive, directive, argumentative, evaluative, and metacommunicative) by means of the corresponding tactics.