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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 32:1 (2022) ► pp.1–27

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Polar answers and epistemic stance in Greek conversation

ORCiD logo with link | Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | Hellenic Open University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 17 August 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19031.alv
Abstract
This conversation analytic study examines the linguistic resources for indexing epistemic stance in second position in question sequences in Greek conversation. It targets three formats for providing affirming/confirming answers to polar questions: unmarked and marked positive response tokens, and repetitions. It is shown that the three formats display different functional distributions. Unmarked response tokens do ‘simple’ answering, marked response tokens provide overt confirmations, and repetitional answers assert the respondent’s epistemic authority besides confirming the question’s proposition. Unmarked and marked response tokens accept the questioner’s epistemic stance, whereas repetitional answers may accept or resist the epistemic terms of the question, depending on the action being implemented by the question. This study sheds light on the organization of questioning and answering in Greek conversation and the role of epistemics in the design of polar answers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Questions and answers
    • 1.2Polar questions in Modern Greek
  • 2.Data and method
    • 2.1Quantitative data
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Unmarked positive response tokens
    • 3.2Marked positive response tokens
    • 3.3Repetition
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (67)
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