Questions and responses in Lao》.pdf

Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2649–2665 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: ww w.els evier .com/locat e/pragma Questions and responses in Lao N.J. Enfield a,b,c,* a Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PB 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands b Radboud University Nijmegen, PB 9102, 6500 HC, The Netherlands c Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, PB 9102, 6500 HC, The Netherlands A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: This paper surveys the structure of questions and their responses in Lao, a Southwestern Tai Received 29 March 2010 language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Data are from video-recordings of Accepted 2 April 2010 naturally occurring conversation in Vientiane, Laos. An outline of the lexico-grammatical options for formulating questions describes content (‘WH’) questions and polar (‘yes/no’) Keywords: questions. The content question forms are from a set of indefinite pronouns. The WHAT, Lao language WHERE, and WHO categories have higher token frequency than the other categories. Polar Questions Polar (yes/no) questions questions are mostly formed by the addition of different turn-final markers, with different Content (WH) questions meanings. ‘Declarative questions’ (i.e., polar questions which are formally identical to Conversation statements) are common. An examination of th