Pursuing Common Ground: Nondisaffiliative Rhetorical Questions in Mandarin Conversations

ABSTRACT

Rhetorical questions have been regularly observed to implement disaffiliative actions in conversations such as challenging, complaining, or retorting. This article, however, reports on nondisaffiliative uses of rhetorical questions based on a particular structure in Mandarin, bushi … ma, which can serve as a conventional question, a disaffiliative rhetorical question, or a nondisaffiliative rhetorical question. Although much less studied, nondisaffiliative uses are by far more frequent in conversations. Integrating discourse-functional linguistics and conversation analysis, this study argues that nondisaffiliative bushi … ma rhetorical questions work to pursue common ground so as to move the activity-in-progress forward. Moreover, it examines the sequential contexts in which they are recurrently produced and identifies the interactional clues—epistemic, sequential, prosodic—that make these rhetorical questions recognizable as seeking common ground. This article contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical question as a grammatical device that maximizes intersubjectivity in conversation, further confirming the mutual influence between grammar and social interaction. Data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.

Disclosure

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The abbreviations used in the morpheme-by-morpheme glossing line are as follows: ASP = aspect marker; CL = classifier; COMP = complement; COP = copular verb; DM = discourse marker; INJ = interjection; MP = modal particle; NEG = negative marker; PN = proper noun; QP = question particle; and SP = structural particle.

² It should be noted that Mandarin question intonation is still an ongoing debate, revolving around the acoustic correlates of questions that set them apart from declarative and exclamatory sentences. Localized terminal pitch rise is one of the acoustic characteristics that have been identified so far. Others include a higher global register (e.g., Liu & Xu, 2005; Shen, 1990), expanded pitch range (Lee, 2000; Yuan, 2004; Yuan et al., 2002), and higher strength of sentence final tones (Yuan, 2006; Yuan et al., 2002). Although some of these characteristics might also be relevant to the prosodic production of bushi … ma NRQs, this article, given its qualitative orientation, discusses the most auditorily accessible and easily identifiable characteristic, i.e., terminal rise, leaving a systematic and quantitative investigation for future endeavors.