Declarative Questions Research Articles

Investigating question-answer sequences in child mental health assessments: Engaging children and families through declarative question design

ObjectiveIn mental health settings, before a child can be diagnosed with a mental health condition, they must initially be assessed. These assessments are characterised by question-answer sequences with the child and family members, and our objective is to explore the function of declarative questions. MethodsVideo recordings of mental health assessments from 28 families were collected, each being approximately 90 min. Referred children were aged 6–17-years. Data were transcribed using the Jefferson approach and conversation analysis was used. ResultsAttention to question-answer sequences identified that one common type was the declarative question. We focus on three identifiable forms: clean language short declaratives, declaratives with extreme case formulations, and reformulation declaratives. ConclusionsThe response to these three types of declaratives formed the basis for subsequent question-answer elaboration sequences. The question functioned both to engage the child directly and align with other family members. Practice implicationsImplications for practitioners are that these types of declarative questions offer a resource to engage in fact-checking in a way that is non-face-threatening. Conversation analysis provides a methodological tool for practitioners to engage in reflective practice to enhance their clinical skills in relation to question design.

Interpreting Declarative Questions in Australian Courts

In common law courtrooms, questions are not merely questions, as they are often used strategically with varying illocutionary force and point. This article dealt with the under-investigated Chinese-English interpretations of declarative questions in virtual court proceedings. Drawn upon the interpreting performance data collected from 50 certified interpreters, the findings revealed that systematic alterations of declaratives that shift the pragmatic force in cross-examination. Such alterations may have further implications for counsels’ questioning strategies and judicial outcomes. This study intends to inform future pedagogical practice in specialised court interpreter training.

Declarative or declarative question?—On the acoustics of English prosody of Hong Kong trilingual children with autism spectrum disorder

The current study investigated the production of English prosody (i.e., focus marking) of trilingual Cantonese children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their typically developing (TD) peers (i.e., Cantonese and American English children without ASD) using declarative questions. Speech materials were segmented at word and syllable levels, and word duration, f0, f0 range and intensity were extracted. Acoustic data were fitted using linear mixed-effects models with different explanatory variables followed by a likelihood ratio test. Between group comparison showed that the ASD group had significantly more fluctuating f0 range in post-focus words than the TD groups, which is likely to be an indication of hypercorrection, i.e., over-application of perceived prosodic pattern in English declarative questions. Within groups, the Cantonese children showed different patterns to the English children in terms of the interaction between the acoustic measures and on-focus expansion and post-focus compression. The Cantonese ASD group showed some degree of post-focus compression in terms of duration and mean f0, while the Cantonese TD group only had such pattern in terms of mean f0. The English TD group had a tendency of on-focus expansion in terms of duration and f0 range, but post-focus words showed significantly higher mean f0 than the pre- and on-focus ones, probably due to the question intonation.

Questioning Strategies in Courtrooms

This paper attempts to explore the different strategies of questioning in courtroom discourse, by highlighting the various discursive structures employed to form a question between courtroom interlocutors. More specifically, this research looks at the techniques employed in courtroom cross-examination to persuade the judge(s) to accept attorneys' accounts of what happened as well as the effectiveness of responses in fending off the influence and power of barristers. The corpus of this study is taken from 3 testimonies of prosecution witnesses in the trial of Timothy McVeigh concerning the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1997. By employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the study investigates six questioning patterns, including wh-questions, yes-no questions, tag questions, so-questions, say-questions, and declarative questions. The study reveals that some types of questions used in courtrooms are strategically utilized to persuade juries and judges, confirm a piece of information, clarify an argument, threatening witnesses’ face, manipulate and/or coerce interlocutors within courtrooms. The paper also reveals that questioning is not only used to instigate an answer or a response but also to communicate information and draw conclusions.

The intonation of declarative questions in Northern British English varieties in spontaneous speech

In this study, we analyse a sample of 76 utterances drawn from a corpus of spontaneous speech from the north of England. The selected statements present a declarative structure with different pragmatic functions (yes/no questions, echo questions, tag questions, and rhetorical questions). The objective of this study is to observe and describe the intonation of questions with a declarative structure in English from the north of England in spontaneous speech. Likewise, the pertinent bibliographic review is carried out for its subsequent discussion in view of the results obtained. The analysis is carried out in Praat, through the Melodic Analysis of Speech method (CANTERO, 2002) that allows the extraction of stylized, quantifiable and comparable melodic curves. As a result of this analysis, we obtain five different melodic that we can define as rising (21%), falling (50%), rising-falling (13%), final inflection with raised nucleus (4%), and declination and final rising inflection (12%).

Language Contact, Language Ecology, and Intonational Variation in the Yami Community.

This study investigates socioprosodic variation in Yami, a moribund indigenous language under intense contact with Mandarin in Taiwan: 32 bilingual (Yami-dominant, balanced, Mandarin-dominant) and 5 Yami-monolingual participants were recruited. We used an Interactive Card Game to elicit semi-spontaneous speech for neutral questions (NQ), default declarative questions (DQ1), and declarative questions with lighter incredulity (DQ2). Results reveal that (1) yes/no question intonation in Yami is highly variable; (2) on a broad community level, the DQ1-DQ2 distinction is absent from Yami; and (3) there is prosodic hybridization and innovation in bilingual speech. In particular, we see significant differences in DQ1 and NQ productions, with DQ1s having a rising nuclear configuration, higher pitch level, and wider pitch span, while NQs are realized with a mid-level pattern, lower pitch level, and narrower pitch span. DQ2 utterances exhibited highly varied nuclear configuration patterns with no significant differences in either pitch level or pitch span in DQ1-DQ2 comparisons. Yet, there is evidence that a hybridized DQ2 has begun to be integrated into Yami among younger bilinguals, suggesting that present-day Yami is in flux and is undergoing restructuring.These intonational variations are not easily attributable to a weakened Yami identity. Rather, younger bilinguals, who are leading the change, are highly dedicated to cultural practices and show strong rootedness in their Indigenous identity. Seemingly, while these less fluent speakers no longer use Yami to fulfill their everyday communicative needs, they are leaning more on its socio-indexical functions to reflect their ethnocultural identity.

Perception and Production of Sentence Types by Inuktitut-English Bilinguals

We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, and declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, and intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements and questions are morphologically marked by a suffix added to the verbal root. Conversely, English absolute questions are both prosodically and syntactically marked, whereas the difference between statements and declarative questions is prosodic. To determine the degree of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) and whether CLI is more prevalent in tasks that require access to contextual information, bilinguals and controls performed three perception and two production tasks, with varying degrees of context. Results showed that bilinguals did not differ from controls in their perception of low-pass filtered utterances but diverged in contextualized tasks. In production, bilinguals, as opposed to controls, displayed a reduced use of pitch in the first pitch accent. In a discourse-completion task, they also diverged from controls in the number of non-target-like realizations, particularly in declarative question contexts. These findings demonstrate patterns of prosodic and morphosyntactic CLI and highlight the importance of incorporating contextual information in prosodic studies. Moreover, we show that the absence of tonal variations can be transferred in a stable language contact situation. Finally, the results indicate that comprehension may be hindered for this group of bilinguals when sentence type is not redundantly marked.

Функции вопросительных предложений в русском и американском политическом дискурсе: сравнительный анализ

Abstract. Despite the vast research on questions in linguistics, little is known about their functioning in political discourse. So the paper considers questions, their types and functions in political discourse. We pay attention to polar, embedded and non-canonical questions (rhetorical, tag, declarative, special and echo questions), and study their functions depending on discourse participants’ intentions. We also make a qualitative and quantitative analysis and compare the use of questions by V. Putin (Russia) and J. Biden (USA) in interviews to TV channels and during press conferences in order to identify types of questions asked by both presidents and journalists, their functions and connection of the proposed meaning of questions and their interpretation in 60 fragments of political discourse. The study shows that four types of questions are typical for political discourse of Russia and the USA: polar (10% and 34.5%), rhetorical (60% and 65.5%), special (15% and 0%) and echo questions (15% and 0%). Unlike their proposed meaning, polar questions are structured so that the interviewer can get a preferred response; echo questions are aimed at drawing the attention of journalists and the audience to certain parts or expressing negative emotions; rhetorical questions are used by politicians to make the audience think about specific facts, events or consequences or highlight the role of the country on the world arena. Special questions are asked to get accurate information that coincides with their original connotation. The results obtained are promising for further study of the functioning of questions in the speech of politicians.

Echoes of Past Contact: Venetian Influence on Cretan Greek Intonation.

Prosodic aspects of cross-linguistic contact are under-researched, especially past contact that has subsequently ceased. In this paper, we investigate declarative and polar question tunes of contemporary Cretan Greek, a regional variety of Greek whose speakers were in contact with Venetian speakers during the four and half centuries of Venetian rule on the island, from 1204 to 1669. The F0 contours of the Cretan tunes and alignment of peaks and troughs of interest with the nuclear vowel are compared to the corresponding tunes in Venetian dialect and Venetian Italian and to those in Athenian (Standard) Greek, which are used as control. The data (1610 declarative utterances and 698 polar questions) were drawn from natural speech corpora based on pragmatic criteria: broad focus for declaratives, broad focus, and information-seeking interpretation for polar questions. The pitch contour shapes of the tunes are modeled using polynomial basis functions, and the F0 alignment points are determined analytically. The results show the robustness of contact effects almost three and a half centuries after regular contact ceased and indicate that the shapes of the F0 contours of Cretan and Venetian declarative and polar question tunes are similar. In addition, Cretan alignment patterns are similar to Venetian and significantly different from Athenian. Insights are gained from research into how long prosodic characteristics may persist in a recipient language-decades or even centuries after the cessation of contact.

A Contrastive Corpus-Based Approach to the Expression of Adversarialness across English and Persian: A Case Study of Political Press Conferences

With the point of departure in discourse analysis (DA), this corpus comparative study concentrated on sequences with adversarial questions in political press conferences to investigate the differences in the use of adversarial questioning between two contexts, namely, English and Persian political press conferences, and particularly highlight the strategies which were used by journalists in such sequences of talk journalists and politicians so as to show the importance of improving linguistic proficiency in EFL context. For this reason, this study analyzed a corpus of data from some political press conferences with American and Iranian Government which is randomly selected from appropriate websites between 2007 and 2021. The study applied Clayman, Heritage, and McDonald (2006) for quantifying adversarial questions as exhibited by the press to the questions addressed the Presidents of Iran and the United States. Questions from selected conferences were coded according to adversarialness. Frequency and chi-square tests were used for analysis. The results showed significant difference across the 2 corpora in some journalists’ questions. In terms of question design, accountability questions in Iranian journalists’ questions as Persian corpus indicated higher frequency. In addition, in referencing frames, higher frequency was observed in declarative questions in Persian corpus. However, English corpus displayed higher frequency in other-referencing frames. Finally, in content adversarialness, global adversarialness indicated higher frequency in Persian corpus. Consequently, the results showed that adversarial questions were used in Persian corpus more significantly than English corpus. The results of the study not only will help the students gain linguistic competence, but it will also improve their overall language proficiency.

Questioning and answering strategies in Malaysian criminal proceedings

Questioning and answering strategies in Malaysian criminal proceedings

Questions in English and Swedish fiction texts

AbstractThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the use and translation of English and Swedish questions in fiction by using a combination of parallel and comparable corpus data extracted from the bidirectional English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. In particular, the study examines questions containing a question mark (QMquestions) categorised intowh-interrogatives, polar interrogatives, alternative questions, tag questions (including those with invariant tags), declarative questions,wh-fragments and non-wh-fragments. The parallel analysis shows that most QMquestion types are more often translated congruently into English than into Swedish. The focus is on types with low mutual correspondence scores: fragments, tag questions and declarative questions. The comparable analyses concern both bilingual contrasts between the original texts and monolingual contrasts between the translation and original subcorpora in both languages. The bilingual analysis aligns with several preliminary findings in the parallel analysis, e.g. the favouring of tag questions and some types ofwh-fragments in English. The monolingual analysis reveals both over- and underuse in translations and points to a strong effect of source-language influence.

Perception and comprehension of L2 English sentence types

L2 prosody is particularly difficult to acquire, because it requires an understanding of intonation, syntax, and pragmatics. For example, to acquire English sentence types, speakers must learn that statements (Ss) and absolute yes/no questions (AQs) are syntactically and prosodically marked, whereas the difference between Ss and declarative questions (DQs) is purely prosodic. Moreover, DQs can only occur in restricted contexts, such as to express surprise. In this paper, we examine the L2 perception and comprehension of English sentence types, by speakers of three typologically distinct L1s (Spanish, Mandarin, Inuktitut), with the goal of investigating the role of crosslinguistic influence (CLI). Spanish uses only intonation (a higher initial pitch accent and final rising boundary tone) to distinguish Ss from AQs and DQs, whereas in Mandarin, questions (AQs and DQs) can be syntactically identical to statements or marked by the lexical particle –ma. Mandarin also has a prosodic distinction between broad focus and echo questions (which are similar to English AQs and DQs). In contrast, Inuktitut has a very restricted use of pitch, and primarily marks questions morphologically. Learners of each L1 and English controls performed three tasks that varied in the amount of contextual and linguistic information available. Our results revealed evidence of both positive and negative CLI. Inuktitut and Mandarin speakers demonstrated some tendencies to focus more on syntax than intonation. Moreover, the Mandarin speakers were the most successful at acquiring the pragmatic distinction between AQs and DQs, which we argue is due to a similar contrast in Mandarin.

Mathematical help-seeking: observing how undergraduate students use the Internet to cope with a mathematical task

We report on a study focused on identifying how undergraduate students make use of the Internet as a source of help to solve their mathematical queries. In particular, with the help of monitoring software, we observe how a group of engineering students use the Internet to solve a mathematical task related to the concept of definite integral, and we produce a characterization of their help-seeking behaviors. We observed that students manifest instrumental help-seeking behaviors mostly associated with the procedural items of the task (such as solving a definite integral), although there were executive help-seeking manifestations associated with the declarative questions (such as providing definitions). There was a general pattern of behavior manifested by the students who participated in the study; this pattern was dominated by the use of search engines and keywords to identify sources of mathematical help.

경찰통역 담화에서 의문문 유형과 기능 : 제도대화의 특징을 중심으로

This study intends to examine the types and functions of interrogative sentences used in the interpreting of police-suspect interview discourse in Korea. The findings of this analysis are as follows: First, the Korean police usually employed wh-interrogative sentences to ask for information from foreign suspects while using negative yes-no questions or declarative questions to refute the statements of foreign suspects. This attests to the fact that police officers use different types of interrogative sentences based on their investigation strategies. Second, foreign suspects made a number of questions about the intention of police officers’ questions or others. In particular, they asked questions the most when they were read their Miranda rights. This was mainly caused by the imbalance of knowledge between the two sides, which is one of the features found in institutional discourse. In the end, foreign suspects use a question as a means to protect their rights and make a statement favorable to themselves. Third, interpreters asked questions mainly about the case under examination to foreign suspects and police officers. This was also attributable to the imbalance of information and knowledge between the parties involved. In addition, interpreters sometimes asked additional questions to foreign suspects to get exact answers to the questions asked by police officers. This shows that interpreters use questions to confirm the accuracy of their interpretation or lead foreign suspects to provide answers appropriate to the questions police officers ask.

The prevalence of declarative and indirect yes/no Questions when children testify in criminal cases of child sexual abuse in the United States

SummaryThe present study assessed how attorneys questioned children in cases of child sexual abuse in the United States tried between 2005 and 2015. Trial testimonies (N = 134) of 5‐ to 17‐year‐olds (M = 12 years old) were coded for the linguistic form of attorneys' questions and children's subsequent responses. Three fourths of all questions were closed ended. Both declarative (statement question; e.g., “And he hit you?”; 21% of questions) and indirect yes/no questions (beginning with an indirect speech act; e.g., “Do you remember X?”; 11% of questions) were common, and produced potentially problematic responses, in comparison with forced‐choice and yes/no questions. Declarative questions elicited the highest rates of unelaborative responses whereas indirect yes/no questions elicited the highest rate of nonsubstantive responses. The findings highlight the importance for researchers to better assess children's responses to declarative questions and for prosecuting attorneys to cautiously use declarative and indirect yes/no questions when questioning children.

The Comparison Study of English Humor and Chinese Cross Talk by Epistemics

For several decades, English humor and Chinese cross talk have been studied from the field of epistemics. The main factors making the differences between them are different epistemic gradients between the speaker and the recipient. Both of them would present their respective epistemic status through their epistemic stance, i.e. different grammatical syntax. As both the speaker and the recipient occupy different positions on an epistemic gradient (from more knowledgeable K+ to less knowledgeable K-), the current study applied three kinds of grammatical syntax and illustrated the speaker’s moment-by-moment expression of speaker’s epistemic domain, including declarative syntax, tag questions, and interrogative syntax from both English humor and classical Chinese cross talk. Through the analysis of the dialogues, the study revealed the following aspects. First, both speakers and recipients compete for epistemic status during their interaction. They would like to adopt different epistemic stances to show that they are more informative than their partners. Second, humor is the essential part of both English humor and Chinese cross talk, which can be easily understood even though it is in different media. Third, the ultimate purpose of English humor and Chinese cross talk is to create a harmonious atmosphere and maintain good social relations. (Taiyuan Normal University, Jeonju University)

Declarative Question Answering over Knowledge Bases Containing Natural Language Text with Answer Set Programming

While in recent years machine learning (ML) based approaches have been the popular approach in developing endto-end question answering systems, such systems often struggle when additional knowledge is needed to correctly answer the questions. Proposed alternatives involve translating the question and the natural language text to a logical representation and then use logical reasoning. However, this alternative falters when the size of the text gets bigger. To address this we propose an approach that does logical reasoning over premises written in natural language text. The proposed method uses recent features of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to call external NLP modules (which may be based on ML) which perform simple textual entailment. To test our approach we develop a corpus based on the life cycle questions and showed that Our system achieves up to 18% performance gain when compared to standard MCQ solvers.

But, you see, the problem is … Perception verbs in courtroom talk: Focus on you see

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the body of research on the use of perception verbs in interaction and, more specifically, to enhance the understanding of how participants in courtroom proceedings exploit you see to manage the discourse as it unfolds and to negotiate stance. Against the background of earlier work on vision words in interaction, the study looks at parenthetical and non-parenthetical you see to reveal both perceptual and cognitive uses, and to identify their local pragmatic effect. As the analysis indicates, in the data at hand, lexical you see is more readily recruited than non-lexical you see, and it is found chiefly in grammatical and declarative questions. At the same time, it is the clause-initial you see that visibly brings out the epistemic tensions between the speakers and serves to contest the addressee’s position. The study corroborates the claim that you see is an argumentative marker, whose meaning (and force) depends on its formal properties (position, complementation) and the relationship between the speakers.

Estonian declarative questions: Their usage and comparison with vä- and jah-questions

Our article aims to contribute to our understandings about using different polar question formats in everyday Estonian interaction. The article compares the division of labour between three “knowing” stance question formats: declarative questions (DQ) and tag questions formulated by vä and jah. The research is based on language in its natural environment, thus illustrating how grammar is affected by the interaction. The data (303 questions) come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu. Most of DQs are B-event statements but they are also used in the case when the speaker has forgotten the information which (s)he should have access to. DQs are used for requests for confirmation, other-repair initiations, and also initiations of the pre-second insert expansion. Some DQs contain inference markers and particles and adverbs which indicate different degree of certainty. We argue that in addition to the epistemic status of interactants, the previous context is crucial to for treating the declarative as a question. As a result, we propose a three-dimensional framework for declaratives, jah and vä questions. We show that questions differ in three scales: certainty – uncertainty, neutrality – affectivity and expectations for confirmation – non-confirmation as response. In all three scales, declarative questions are in between tag questions. If the questions occur in the same circumstances and implement the same social action, then declarative question is pragmatically unmarked format of the “knowing” stance questions.