Journal
JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS
Volume 188, Issue -, Pages 56-79Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.10.029
Keywords
Empirical pragmatics; Types of questioning; Natural language argumentation
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This paper explores the relationship between linguistics and pragmatics in terms of question structure and context in argumentative discourse. The study demonstrates that different types of questions directly impact the structure of arguments, and challenges previous assumptions about the consequences of non-canonical questions.
Despite questions having a long-standing history in theoretical linguistics, the interface between empirically grounded corpus linguistics of questioning behaviour and analytically driven pragmatic theory of question structure and context has received significantly less attention. This paper aims to contribute to this field of research by showing that a four-way categorisation into question types, namely, pure questioning, assertive questioning, rhetorical questioning and challenge questioning, allows us to capture and represent questions in over two million words in natural language argumentative dialogue. In this type of dialogue questioning has been claimed to serve as the engine that drives the shape and development of a discourse. Our investigation covers three genres of argumentative discourse in which questions play a key role, namely political debates, moral dilemmas and sessions of participatory deliberative democracy. Through deep algorithmic analysis of the data, we test a variety of hypotheses from argumentation and linguistic theory, clearly demonstrating for the first time that (particular types of) questions directly catalyse argument structure and that the illocutionary consequences of non-canonical questions are much more varied than previously thought.
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