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In:The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 46] 2025
► pp. 265–285

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How questions shape interactivity in spoken monologic discourse

 | Université Paris Cité, ALTAE
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.10cel
Abstract
This chapter aims to show how questions shape interactivity in TED talks, i.e. in a non-dialogical discourse where commitment updates cannot be regulated by turn-taking. It is argued that the interactional contribution of questions is restricted to discourse-management functions. The majority of questions are reported to be unanswered. However, questions are reported to be highly interactive by inferring and anticipating questions that may arise in the audience. We argue that they rely on an assumed knowledge state that they contribute to updating. The behaviour of polar, wh- and verbless questions in TED talks supports the idea that this single-speaker discourse genre is dialogically-motivated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Hypotheses and data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Question marking
    • 4.2Answerhood
    • 4.3Interlocution
    • 4.4Discursive context
    • 4.5Relation to subsequent context
    • 4.6Relation to preceding context
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Interaction in TED talks
    • 5.2Interlocution without interaction
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Corpus data
  • References
References (29)
Corpus data
Celle Agnès, Dima Alkhateeb, Antonina Bondarenko, Lisa Brunetti, Michele Cardo, Anne Jugnet, Manon Lelandais, Loïc Liégeois, Jacob Rigal (forthcoming). TransQuest : la transmission du savoir en questions dans les TED talks anglais et français. Dataset.
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