What Do "Echo Questions" Echo?

Echo questions, an interesting language phenomenon, are prevalent in verbal conversation. As for the previous studies on echo questions, we find that most scholars do their research under the framework of Cooperation Theory and Relevance Theory, and little has been done basing on Adaptation Theory.The research is based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, and our data are selected from Cao Yu's four plays, Thunderstorm, Sunrise, Peking Citizen and the Field. This paper discusses echo questions in detail from the following three main aspects: sound, form and meaning. Besides, echo questions also can express the speaker's surprise, incredulity, retort, dissatisfaction and irony. Thus we put our focus on pragmatic features. In the meanwhile, we give a reply to the question mentioned in the title. That is to say, what echo questions echo is the sound, the form and the meaning.We think that the production and interpretation of echo questions are the realization of adaptation to many kinds of inner and outer language contexts. Because Echo questions can be produced and interpreted only if the utterer and the hearer must take inner and outer language contexts into consideration dynamically. What is more, through calculating the data and ratio of each type, we find that we echoer tend to repeating what he or she is interested rather than the whole prior utterance.