Pragmatics - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2001

Against the theoretical and methodological background of conversation analysis (CA), the author addresses the issue of the contextual conditions for a specific type of grammatical phenomenon: answers to yes-no questions. She distinguishes five kinds of answers: two minimal ones, one next to minimal one, and two sentential types of answers. Minimal and non-minimal types of answers are shown to be doing different kinds of work in an interaction, full sentence answers addressing a wider range of features oriented to in the context either by the questioner or in the interpretation. The different types are placed along a confirmation-negation continuum.

The paper is a relevance-theoretic account of the meaning of the Serbian particle baš, once a content word, now a pragmatic particle restricted to informal discourse. It is argued that the emphatic and specificatory senses of baš can be subsumed under a single description of the particle as a marker of non-loose use. The argumentation is based on the relevance-theoretic distinction between description and interpretation in language use and on the notion of loose talk. The main issue of how the particle contributes to the relevance of its host-utterance is anchored in a tripartite distinction: Conceptual/procedural, truth-functional/non-truth-functional, explicature/implicature. It is claimed that the particle baš is a procedural, non-truth-functional linguistic item that contributes to relevance by constraining the explicit content of the host-utterance.

The focus of the paper is the appropriateness of pragmatic elicitation techniques for generating talk to be used in analyses of talk and social structure. In the best pragmatic elicitation techniques (i) data are generated in situations in which researchers can manipulate variables in the testing of hypotheses, and (ii) speakers can talk freely and spontaneously without awareness that their talk is the object of study. This claim was tested in an examination of the hypothesis that more facework will occur in refusals to a High versus Low status requester. Requester status was manipulated in Oral and Written Discourse Completion, Role Play, and an Experimental elicitation technique. Support for the hypothesis was found only in the Role Play and Experimental conditions. Next, refusals generated in the above four elicitation conditions were compared to Naturally-occurring refusals. At the levels of the acts by which refusals are accomplished and the internal structure of the head act, Oral and Written DC produced anomalous and non-representative refusals. Role Play and the Experimental technique produced refusals that were very similar to Natural refusals, though Role Play refusals tended to be somewhat repetitive and long-winded. It is concluded that an Experimental technique is the preferred pragmatic elicitation technique.