Seeking Information: Contextual Influences on Question Formulation

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Abstract
Questioning has epistemic and social dimensions. Most studies on question formulation focus on one or other of these, associating them with different aspects of questioning utterances. Politeness is considered predominantly socially affected, whereas the use of closed questions is seen as determined by the speakers' amount of pre-knowledge. The purpose of this study is to explore the interrelationship between social and knowledge factors in question formulation. In an experiment, hypotheses about the influence of the speaker's state of knowledge as well as the effect of social factors (the addressee's cooperativeness and the social legitimation to insist on an answer) on politeness and the use of closed questions are tested. The results indicate social influences on both accounts whereas no knowledge impact on politeness could be found. The findings strongly support focusing on extended questioning utterances instead of restricted single sentence formulations.

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