Syntactic Structure and Communicative Function of Echo Questions in Chinese Dialogues

Abstract

Echo question is a linguistic phenomenon that exists in verbal interaction. A typical echo question is usually a repetition of others’ speech information as a response to him/her. The “repetition” feature makes it a drilling task in language teaching. Although quite common in linguistic field, there is limited specialized research on it. Existing studies mainly focus on its semantic relations, structural features, pragmatic features, etc., with few exploring the interactive relationships among them. Based on speech corpus Discourse-CASS which contains more than 6 hours records [1], this paper proposes an annotation scheme for echo question and makes a simple statistical analysis and discusses the interaction relations between the syntactic structure and the pragmatic functions. We conclude that echo questions can be expressed by various of interrogative sentences, usually expressing the intention of requesting confirmation and explication. Confirmation request can be divided into requests for affirmation, repetition, and supplement. There are also two kinds of echo questions shown as backchannel or understanding check. Explication request can be requests for details and explanation request. In conversation, echo questions most often express the intention of requesting affirmation, which are always in the form of yesno question and tag question.