Noticing Breaches with Nonpolar Interrogatives: Estonian Kes (“Who”) Ascribing Responsibility for Problematic Conduct

ABSTRACT

This article targets action formation in multimodal sequences. It shows how nonpolar interrogatives in Estonian are used for noticing breaches in others’ embodied conduct, focusing on kes (“who”)-interrogatives. In contrast to information questions with kes, a “noticing of a breach” does not seek an informative answer, which would be an identification of the grammatical actor of the action depicted in the interrogative. The actor is instead the addressee of the turn, often called by name, and thus clear to everyone present. These “rhetorical” kes-interrogatives formulate a just-observed conduct as problematic, and attribute responsibility for it. Since they call for either a remedy of the (embodied) conduct or a contesting of the blame as the next action, noticing breaches marginally qualify as directive actions. At the same time, they do not explicitly provide any guidelines for the future. The study argues that to determine function in language, it is necessary to study grammatical structures in their temporally emerging and embodied activity contexts. The data are Estonian with English translation.

Notes

¹ In this article we use the term interrogative for the syntactic category and the term question for the functional category. However, terms such as rhetorical question are used in accordance with the established tradition.

² The word kes can in principle be declined in all 14 cases of Estonian. In the corpora, however, the interrogative formulation of a breach was only found with the nominative.

³ Human-pet interaction has been studied from different aspects. For example, Tannen (2007) shows, among other things, how speakers use dogs as resources to praise their interlocutor, to mitigate criticism, and to bring humorous tone to an argument. Even in our case, the noticing of a breach may well be done for the benefit of the human audience.

⁴ We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for wondering about this detail.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (PUT475), and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies).