Cover not available

Article published In: Language and Dialogue
Vol. 6:2 (2016) ► pp.207–222

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

A particular kind of ‘action-reaction’

Questions answering questions (in Spanish and Romanian dialogues)

 | California State University, Los Angeles (USA)
Published online: 18 August 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.6.2.01dum
In this article, I discuss a particular (and little studied) action-reaction exchange in Spanish and Romanian, consisting of a dyadic exchange where an exploratory speech act (i.e., a question) is followed by a sequence-dependent reactive speech act, which repeats parts or all of the trigger’s structure in an interrogative form. Rather than being a canonical echo question, the reactive speech act under discussion represents what I call an Interrogative Echo Response (IER), by virtue of the fact that it provides an answer of opposite polarity to that of the initiative move put forward by the questioner (or Interrogative Echo Reply, when the response may or must be explicitly provided after the sequence-dependent interrogative utterance). In both languages, these IERs (and IERps) have a distinct syntactic structure, and the discourse function they fulfill is that of rhetorically challenging the validity of the initial move and providing (or implying) a response of opposite polarity with regard to the triggering question.
References (19)
Academia Română. 2005. Gramatica limbii române. II. Enunţul. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alonso-Cortés, Ángel. 1999. “Las construcciones exclamativas. La interjección y las expresiones vocativas. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, ed. by. Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 3993–4050. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briz, Antonio and Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2002. Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales. Madrid: Arcos Libros and ILSE.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dascălu-Jinga, Laurenţia and Liana Pop (coord). 2003. Dialogul în româna vorbită. Bucureşti: Oscar Print.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dumitrescu, Domniţa. 1993. “Función pragma-discursiva de la interrogación ecoica usada como respuesta en español”. In Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español, ed. by Henk Haverkate, Kees Hengeveld and Gijs Mulder. Diálogos Hispánicos 121: 51–85.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. “Rhetorical vs. nonrhetorical allo-repetition: The case of Romanian interrogatives”. Journal of Pragmatics 261: 321–354. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. “Subordinación y recursividad en la conversación: las secuencia integradas por intercambios ecoicos”. In La pragmática lingüística del español. Recientes desarrollos, ed. by Henk Haverkate, Gijs Mulder and Carolina Fraile Maldonado. Diálogos Hispánicos 221: 277–314.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. “Oraciones interrogativas directas. Oraciones interrogativas indirectas y otras estructuras”. In Enciclopedia de lingüística hispánica, ed. by Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, 750–772. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Escandell Vidal, María Victoria. 1999. “Los enunciados interrogativos: Aspectos semánticos y pragmáticos”. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, ed. by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 3929–3991.Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu, Liliana (coord). 2002. Interacţiunea verbală în româna actuală. Corpus (selectiv). Schiţă de tipologie. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lope Blanch, Juan (ed). 1981. El habla de la ciudad de México: Materiales para su estudio. México, D.F.: UNAM.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(ed). 1995. El habla popular de la Repúbica Mexicana: Materiales para su estudio. México D.F.: UNAM and El Colegio de México.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morales, Amparo and María Vaquero (eds).1992. El habla culta de San Juan: Materiales para su estudio. San Juan: Universidad de Puerto Rico.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moreno Fernández, Francisco, Ana Mª Cestero Mancera, Isabel Molina Martos and Florentino Paredes García (eds). 2004. La lengua hablada en Alcalá de Henares: Corpus PRESEEA-ALCALÁ. II. Hablantes de instrucción media. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá (Servicio de Publicaciones).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. 2009. Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Libros.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Săftoiu, Răzvan. 2009. Discursul fatic: Un ritual interacţional. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steel, Brian. 1985. A Textbook of Colloquial Spanish. Madrid: S.G.E.L.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weigand, Edda. 2010. Dialogue – The Mixed Game. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Wang, Zhe & Zhanhao Jiang
2020. Asking, answering and assessing with hands: how co-speech hand gestures contribute to question-initiated interactions in Chinese kindergarten classroom. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 28:6 ► pp. 823 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue