Request for confirmation sequences in German
- In request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, interlocutors negotiate their social positions regarding access and rights to knowledge. The article presents an overview of a quantitative analysis of 200 RfCs and their responses in German conversations to highlight the relevant linguistic resources speakers of the language deployed to position themselves vis-à-vis a confirmable proposition. In German RfCs, modal particles and tags play an important role in expressing the requester’s epistemic stance; explicit inference marking is used less frequently. Responses usually include response tokens (among others doch as a token specialized for disconfirming negatively formatted RfCs) and an expansion. The article shows that such expansions do important work to tailor the response to the situated informational needs of the requester in a cooperative way beyond the constraints of type-conformity.
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| Author: | Arnulf DeppermannORCiDGND, Alexandra GubinaORCiDGND, Katharina KönigORCiDGND, Martin PfeifferORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-127833 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2024-0008 |
| ISSN: | 2300-9969 |
| Parent Title (English): | Open Linguistics |
| Publisher: | de Gruyter |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of first Publication: | 2024 |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2024/08/21 |
| Publishing Institution: | Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) |
| Publicationstate: | Veröffentlichungsversion |
| Reviewstate: | Peer-Review |
| Tag: | German; interactional linguistics; request for confirmation; response particles; tags |
| GND Keyword: | Antwortverhalten; Bestätigung; Deutsch; Konversationsanalyse; Refrainfrage; Syntax |
| Volume: | 10 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 23 |
| Note: | Work on this article has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) project number 413161127 – Scientific Network ‘Interactional Linguistics – Discourse particles from a cross-linguistic perspective’, led by Martin Pfeiffer and Katharina König. |
| DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik |
| Open Access?: | ja |
| Linguistics-Classification: | Gesprächsforschung / Gesprochene Sprache |
| Program areas: | Pragmatik |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International |