A Study Of English General Questions And Their Answers From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

The use of general questions is a very common linguistic phenomenon in English verbal communication.General question is a simple structure traditionally prescribed to be used for the function of inquiry.In actual communication,General questions usually do not merely raise questions for inquiry,but perform many pragmatic functions in a context. Linguists concern themselves much more with the pragmatic principles and English grammar concerning general questions respectively,whereas little has been touched on the combination of the two fields to facilitate verbal communication.As a result,English learners encounter much difficulties and confusion in understanding them in oral interactions.Therefore,a holistic analysis of general questions in terms of their functions under different contexts is necessary.After an overview of the existing syntactic,semantic and pragmatic studies on general questions,it is concluded that the present study requires a more feasible approach to analyze this special linguistic phenomenon.This study is aimed at providing a bird's-eye-view of communicative functions and relevance nature of general questions and their answers with the Cooperative Principle(CP),the Face Theory and the relevance theory(RT) as the theoretical framework of the study.This study,methodologically speaking,relies on the qualitative analysis of the data both in written and spoken forms,which are mainly accessed through New Concept English 2,the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and some other linguistic works.Theory-driven and data-driven,the present study has achieved some findings through the detailed analysis of the data.In the light of the CP and Face Theory,it is found that,besides seeking information, general questions are employed as a strategy to mitigate the face threatening force or show their politeness in some contexts,such as softening imperative force,giving criticisms and making suggestions,etc.Moreover,general questions play a great role in eliciting some topics to break the ice in verbal interactions.Through the analysis of the data,this study has concluded five pragmatic functions performed by the answers of the general questions. They are providing information,explaining reasons,expressing disagreement,expressing refusal and showing noncooperation.This study shows that the intonation of general questions also plays an important role in conveying utterance meaning in spoken communication besides the function of inquiry. That is,different intonations can also be used to express different utterance meanings of the speaker.Variations of stress in the use of general questions influence communicative intentions that the speaker expects to convey in a context.The present study has attempted to analyze the production and interpretation of English general questions and their answers based on the RT.The production and interpretation of general questions and their answers are the process of pursuing relevance.The speaker codes his/her intention in general questions and their answers and transfers it to the hearer. In this process,in order to make the general questions and their answers understood,the speaker has to make sure that their questions and the answers are relevant enough to draw the hearers' attention with the minimal processing effort in a context.The hearer infers the information provided by the general questions and answers according to the cognitive context that he derives from the possible assumptions to pursue the optimal relevant interpretation.The proper assessment of the cognitive context and mutual knowledge plays an important role in the production and interpretation of general questions and their answer.