Interaktionale Linguistik - Diskurspartikeln aus sprachvergleichender Perspektive

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Martin Pfeiffer
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Experimentelle Linguistik, Typologie, Außereuropäische Sprachen
• Förderung: Förderung von 2018 bis 2024
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 413161127

• Erstellungsjahr: 2025

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

Questions and their responses constitute one of the most common and basic sequence types in social interaction. While previous large-scale studies have identified differences in the distribution of various types of questions and responses across languages, little is known about cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the linguistic design of specific types of questionresponse sequences. Building on an interactional-linguistic and pragmatic typology framework, the scientific network focused on request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in mundane conversation. RfCs play a central role in jointly grounding what speakers consider to be relevant knowledge for the ongoing interaction, while at the same time negotiating epistemic rights and access. Network members collected and coded 200 RfC sequences from one of ten typologically diverse languages, American and British English, Castilian Spanish, Czech, Egyptian Arabic, German, Hebrew, Korean, Low German, Mandarin Chinese, and Yurakaré. Our aim was to compare the linguistic resources that speakers of the different languages use to a) design their turns as RfCs and to b) deal with the relevancies these RfCs establish in their response turns. We took a special interest in the role that discourse particles such as question tags and response tokens play in their relation to other linguistic means by which RfC sequences can be accomplished across languages. A central result of this joint research is a definition of RfCs that relies exclusively on sequential and epistemic criteria in order to be applicable to typologically diverse languages. To qualify as a relevant case, an utterance has to introduce a proposition to the ongoing discourse that makes a polar answer conditionally relevant by proposing a shallow epistemic gradient tilted towards the recipient – thus distinguishing RfCs from other related practices such as requests for information or reconfirmation. The quantitative cross-linguistic analysis of the linguistic design of RfCs reveals the individual profiles of the languages studied, which can be quite distinct even in typologically related languages. For instance, American and British English show a surprisingly low proportion of question tags in RfCs (around 20%) compared to the German dataset in which almost two thirds of all RfCs are designed with a tag. On the other hand, we also identified interesting commonalities between typologically distinct languages. For example, in Yurakaré (an isolate spoken in Bolivia) as well as in Low German, repetitional answers constitute a prominent response type. Qualitative analyses that focus on how RfCs and RfRCs and their responses are used in mundane conversation across languages lay out the intricate ways in which the negotiation of different stances (e.g., a relatively knowing epistemic stance characteristic of RfCs, a stance of remarkability characteristic of RfRCs, the expression of a downgraded epistemic stance in responses to RfCs) is closely linked to the negotiation of (dis)affiliation and social identities. The comparative analyses suggest different interactional or epistemic styles across languages which need to be explored in more detail in future research.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

• Affordances and Actions: Requests for Confirmation as Devices for Implementing Challenging and Other Disagreement- Implicative Actions. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 27-71.
  Küttner, Uwe-A. & Ehmer, Oliver
  
• Less than Confirming, and Doing More than That: Comparing Responses to Requests for Confirmation in German and Yurakaré. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 347-391.
  Gipper, Sonja & Groß, Alexandra
  
• Newsmarks as an Interactional Resource for Indexing Remarkability: A Qualitative Analysis of Arabic waḷḷāhi and English really. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 238-273.
  Marmorstein, Michal & Szczepek Reed, Beatrice
  
• Structurally Similar Formats Are Not Functionally Equivalent across Languages: Requests for Reconfirmation in Comparative Perspective. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 195-237.
  Gipper, Sonja; König, Katharina & Weber, Kathrin
  
• Doing More than Confirming: Expanded Responses to Requests for Confirmation in German Talk-in-Interaction. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 307-346.
  Gubina, Alexandra; Betz, Emma & Deppermann, Arnulf
  
• Request for confirmation sequences in German. Open Linguistics, 10(1).
  Deppermann, Arnulf; Gubina, Alexandra; König, Katharina & Pfeiffer, Martin
  
• Request for confirmation sequences in Hebrew. Open Linguistics, 10(1).
  Ben-Moshe, Yotam M. & Maschler, Yael
  
• Requesting Confirmation or Reconfirmation across Languages: An Introduction. Contrastive Pragmatics, 5(1-2), 1-26.
  König, Katharina & Pfeiffer, Martin
  
• A coding scheme for request for confirmation sequences across languages. Open Linguistics, 11(1).
  König, Katharina; Pfeiffer, Martin & Weber, Kathrin
  
• Coding request for confirmation sequences: Methodological reflections from a cross-linguistic research project. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 58(3), 303-319.
  König, Katharina & Pfeiffer, Martin