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Episode 74 Transcript: Who questions the questions?

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Who questions the questions?’ It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, are we getting enthusiastic about questions? You bet. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a tour through the world of child language acquisition research after Gretchen read 103 papers on different languages.

Gretchen: You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many more bonus episodes.

Lauren: Our thanks, also, to everyone who joined in celebrating Lingthusiasm’s sixth anniversary in November by sharing a link to favourite episodes or your favourite Lingthusiasm fact or just sharing Lingthusiasm more generally.

Gretchen: We’ve really enjoyed seeing and replying to your recommendation posts. Thank you for tagging us in them – @lingthusiasm on all social media networks. Also, our thanks if you shared in private as well. We really appreciate it. It helps every year.

Lauren: In further anniversary celebrations, we’re conducting a listener survey for the first time.

Gretchen: This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying in Lingthusiasm so far and what else we might wanna be doing in the future.

Lauren: Including suggestions for topics.

Gretchen: And maybe crossover episodes with other shows. Also, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of next year.

Lauren: We even got ethics approval from La Trobe University so that we can write up the results maybe as a research paper one day. You can see links to the survey and the ethics information on the Lingthusiasm website in our show notes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm survey is open until December 15th, 2022, anywhere on Earth. Go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvery22 – all one word, all lowercase – to see the links to the survey or to see what an official ethics approval for a fairly minor survey looks like.

Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media.

Gretchen: Whether you’ve joined us recently or you’ve been with us the whole six years, thanks for helping us celebrate our anniversary.

[Music]

Lauren: What is a question?

Gretchen: Is this a question?

Lauren: Am I doing a question now?

Gretchen: This is a question here, right?

Lauren: Question?

Gretchen: Question.

Lauren: We use questions to gather information from each other. It’s why they’re very handy in a conversation.

Gretchen: Sometimes, we also use questions for stylistic or rhetorical effect since we didn’t really answer any of those introductory questions.

Lauren: That is true. But it’s also good to note that questions can have a variety of different grammatical shapes and different patterns to how we articulate them.

Gretchen: One of the things that I think is really cool about questions is the way they cut across a bunch of different linguistic subfields. There are things about the words and the orders of the words and their relationships with each other when it comes to questions. There’re also things about how you modulate the pitch of your voice to make a question. And then there are things about how questions fit into social situations. It really lets us talk about a whole bunch of different areas in linguistics under one simple question.

Lauren: Let’s start with the tone of voice that we use to ask a question.

Gretchen: This is “Question?”

Lauren: Where your voice goes up at the end to indicate that you’re asking a question.

Gretchen: This is sometimes called “question intonation.” This is the way the intonation or the pitch of your voice changes to make something into a question. It’s fairly common, at least in the languages that I’ve studied to any degree, to be like, “Yeah, well, you know, here are some various grammatical strategies to make questions, or you can just use question intonation, i.e., making the pitch of your voice rise towards the end of the sentence.”

Lauren: This is a common strategy across languages but isn’t universally required.

Gretchen: Actually, doing a rising intonation at the end of a sentence to indicate a question isn’t even always indicative of a question in English.

Lauren: No. When I ask, “What is a question?”, I didn’t have to use rising intonation because we had that question word “what” there. It was very clear that it was acting as a question, and I didn’t need that rising intonation.

Gretchen: In fact, if you had, “What is a question?” [with rising intonation], it would almost have sounded like you didn’t know whether you wanted to be asking that question.

Lauren: It adds that uncertainty to it.

Gretchen: Which is a thing that rising intonation can also do in English. If I say something like, “It’s raining out?”, it might be asking, but I might also just be indicating uncertainty about whether or not it’s raining. Questions in English where the structure of the words and how they’re put together already indicates that it’s a question are actually the ones that often don’t use that rising intonation for a question. It’s individual words or phrases that otherwise you couldn’t tell that they’re a question, that’s when this rising intonation shows up the most.

Lauren: There’s also my favourite type of question intonation, which is the British down step, which sounds like an old-fashioned dance, actually, now I say it out loud.

Gretchen: I love this one. I think this is the one that I pick up on whenever I’m talking to British-speaking folks because it just feels very contagious to me.

Lauren: Would you like to give an example? “Would you like to give an example?” [Down step]

Gretchen: Ah, there you are. That’s sort of the “Would you like a cup of tea?” [Down step]

Lauren: Yeah, I find myself very compelled by it as well. It is much more of a British form of intonation than North American. We don’t really have it in Australia either. But whenever I hang around British people that do have this, I feel really compelled by it, and I find myself using it very easily.

Gretchen: This is the one that’s got – on the final word, there’s a relatively sharp fall and this little rise. It’s a little bit hard to hear on “tea” because that’s just one syllable, but if you say something with two syllables, “Would you like a cup of coffee?” [down step], then you have the CO-ffe-E going down and then up again. You can get this nice little shape, which is really fun.

Lauren: [Down stepping] “Would you like a banana?”

Gretchen: [Down stepping] “Would you like an apple?” It’s great.

Lauren: I saw this really interesting post about Meghan Markle picking it up as a feature of her increasingly British-influenced accent that made me feel really reassured that it’s not just me – and the fact that you also find it really compelling as well.

Gretchen: I think, to be honest, when I first met you, I didn’t know whether Australians did this intonation or not. I may have just been doing it around you just to be extra careful – extra polite.

Lauren: Aw, and because it’s a very satisfying intonation contour. Intonation is only helpful for making clear something is a question or not in spoken language. We use a lot of written language as well.

Gretchen: The classic indicator of this rising intonation and this higher pitch at the end is the question mark. If I’m writing down to remind myself, “Tea? Coffee?”, I could put a question mark after each of those. But because of how the question mark indicates that rising intonation, sometimes it’s also used to indicate this upwards pitch at the end of the sentence even when the effect of a question isn’t intended. And then the inverse when you’re asking a question and you mean it sort of rhetorically or ironically, sometimes people, especially in more internet-influenced styles of English, don’t write the question at all. That’s a drier question or a non-question that has the form of a question because you can often tell it from the order of the words or other things about the wording.

Lauren: I like this as a diagnostic for the fact that we have things that are grammatically questions but there are a variety of different reasons that we use question structures, and not all of them are for “I want some information from you.”

Gretchen: There’s about five different ways that some people talk about the form of a question. Exactly. You have this asking for information – “What time is it?” “Do you have a pen?” People often use a question mark there. There’s also requesting action. So, saying something like, “Could you give me that?” That’s sort of a polite question. The question has the effect of politeness. Or “Would you give me a pen?” This is, again, requesting a particular action.

Lauren: I never really thought about the fact that both of those are asking, but they’re asking very different types of things – information and asking someone to do something.

Gretchen: Yeah. Actually, in Spanish, there’s two different verbs that are used to convey these different types of asks. So, asking information is “preguntar,” “me preguntó qué hora fue,” “He asked me what time it was.” This is the asking for information. But to request an action of someone is “pedir,” “Me pidió escribir una carta,” “He asked me to write a letter.” That’s “ask someone to do something” rather than “ask someone about something.”

Lauren: I love when you find a structure in a language that makes something clear that has a different function to two things that just get lumped together for English. That’s really cool.

Gretchen: It’s really great. Then the other three kinds of questions aren’t really about asking at all and, I feel like, tend to grow less and less likely to use question marks when it comes to their written versions because the intonation is also doing very different things. We have rhetorical questions – “What can you expect?” “How could anyone possibly have known?” Sometimes, these are written with a question mark still. I think increasingly in internet-ish styles, they’re often not written with a question mark, as I discuss in my book Because Internet. Then the other two that I think are really interesting, which I would really not write with a question mark, are confirmation of known information. So, if I say, “Did you see that!” [With surprise]

Lauren: Hmm, I think I’d put a punctuation mark like an exclamation mark rather than a question.

Gretchen: Right. Exactly. I can say, “Did you see that?” And then that’s asking about information. But if I say, “Did you see that!”, with two down steps there, I think I’d write it with an exclamation mark, and then it’s more about the confirmation. Then also there’s the intensification use. Something like, “What a big dog!” “Would you look at that sunset!”

Lauren: Huh. Yeah, I mean, they have the structure of a question, and I don’t even think of those as questions.

Gretchen: Like, I’m not saying, “Would you look at this sunset for me and tell me why it’s green?”

Lauren: “Yeah, okay, I can do that. Sure.”

Gretchen: That’s a requesting of action. “Would you look at this cup for me and tell me if you think it’s broken?” Those are real questions that are asking for something. But “Would you look at that sunset!”, again, it’s got this choppier intonation, and I think I would, again, have to write that with an exclamation mark.

Lauren: So, we have five different functions and only the ones that are soliciting information or requesting actions we actually tend to think of as really being questions even though they all have the structure of a question.

Gretchen: Right. Sort of capital Q question-y questions compared to the sort of things that borrow from the world of questions and are actually accomplishing something else. Let’s talk about some of these gold standard capital Q question-y questions.

Lauren: Sure. We can broadly divide questions into two different types. They tend to have different structures because they’re doing different things. The first type are questions where we’re just soliciting a yes/no or a binary or a polar question choice.

Gretchen: “Is/is not.” “Do/do not.” “Do or do not. There is no try.” Sometimes these get called “polar questions.” I think “yes-no questions” may be easier to keep track of from a talking out loud perspective.

Lauren: “Do you like questions?” would be a great example.

Gretchen: “Yes, I do.” “No, I do not.” This solicits an answer that is either yes or no. English is kind of weird about these because we’ve got this “do” there.

Lauren: I think, just as a spoiler, English is weird about questions in general. We’re gonna see this with all the question structures.

Gretchen: I have questions about English and questions.

Lauren: So many questions about English.

Gretchen: A more typical language for yes-no questions might be doing something more like Italian where you have, you know, here’s the statement that you’re saying, but you’ve put a question mark after it. Something like, “Stai bene?”, which is literally like, “You are good?”, but you’ve made it a question.

Lauren: I can either answer, “Sì,” “Yes,” or “No,” “No.”

Gretchen: Or something like, “Parlano italiano?” “They speak Italian?”

Lauren: “Sì.”

Gretchen: No.

Lauren: “No.”

Gretchen: And here, the “they” or the “you” there is not said aloud because Italian doesn’t need them. But that’s not the part that makes them more typical as a question, it’s just, here’s the statement that you’re making, and you can make it into a question. They’re not adding a word like “do” or moving a word like, “Are you good?”, “Are you okay?” They’re not doing any of that stuff. It’s just you can just say it, but say it with a question intonation, it’s fine.

Lauren: If I see a group of people, and I say, “Parlano Italiano?”, “Do they speak Italian?”, and then they all start speaking Italian, I can say, “Parlano Italiano!”, and I don’t have to change anything about the order of those words for it to be a statement. “They do speak Italian.”

Gretchen: You can do this in English to make yes-no questions. You can say something like, “You good?” “Yeah, you’re good.” Or “They speak Italian?” “They speak Italian.” You can do this in intonation with English. But it’s not as much of the default strategy. The default strategy is like, you got to do other stuff with “do” and moving words around.

Lauren: Definitely much more informal to do that kind of question structure.

Gretchen: And it sort of implies in English that you expect the answer to be yes if you say something like, “They speak Italian?” “They speak Italian.”

Lauren: Ah, yeah, I never thought about that, but I feel like that makes sense.

Gretchen: Whereas if they say, “Do they speak Italian?”, you’re sort of more open for the answer to be yes or no. I think that intonation has a more neutral connotation in languages where that’s the default strategy.

Lauren: It’s not the only way to do yes-no questions by any stretch of the imagination. I find it very convenient that Mandarin Chinese uses two other really common strategies that we can talk about, one of them being just a particle that says, “Hey, I’m doing a question right now!”

Gretchen: Right. Mandarin’s got this great word, “ma,” which just means, “This is a question now.” You can add it to something like “Nǐ hǎo,” which is “You good?” literally, and you get, “Nǐ hǎo ma?” The “ma” there means like, “You good (question),” “Are you good?”, “Are you okay?”, “How are you?” – effectively. But it’s just adding, “This is a question now.” It’s very elegant. It’s very straightforward. You can add it to lots of different kinds of sentences and just get, “This is now the yes-no version of this question.” I think there are quite a lot of languages that have some sort of question particle that’s like, “Yup. Now this is a question.”

Lauren: Yeah, very common to have one either at the beginning or the end of a sentence, particularly. They’re good spots to put your question particles. Mandarin also has this other construction where you put the “yes” part and the “no” part in the question together. You have the “yes” version of a verb and the “no” version of a verb together. So, something like, “Do you want tea?”, the “do you want” part would be “Yào bù yào?”

Gretchen: So, that’s literally something like, “Want, not want?”

Lauren: Yeah. Someone says, “Do you want or not want tea?”, as the default question structure. And then you say, “Yào” or “Bù yào,” “I want” or “I don’t want.”

Gretchen: Again, this is making explicit a yes-no question is giving you a choice between two options, you know, “Do you want this or not?” But in English if you wanna say, “Do you want this or not?”, you still have to have that “do” there. It’s great there.

Lauren: In the world’s languages, that is a very uncommon structure. We’ll post the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures map of which you see English as a little dot that’s a very different colour to most of the other things around it because it has a very unusual question structure.

Gretchen: Historically in English, it was a little bit more straightforward in that you just put the verb at the beginning of the sentence. If you say something like, “Have you the time?”, where in present-day English you’d have to say something like, “Do you have the time?”, but in Shakespeare, which is Early-Modern English and earlier, and still in languages like German, you can say something like, “Have you the time?” or “Watch you the video?” or “See you this fish?” or something like that.

Lauren: “Watch you the video?” being a classic line from Shakespeare.

Gretchen: Shakespeare was so big into watching videos. “Watch you this play?” Then what happened in English is that we kept the ability to put the verb at the beginning of the sentence only for auxiliary verbs. You can say, “Are you watching the video?”, “Can you watch the video?”, “Might you watch the video?”, “Have you seen the video?”, but you don’t have the ability to just say, “See you the video?” or “Watch you the video?” anymore. That’s where the “do” comes in because “do” is this lightweight thing that you can just put in if you’ve got to move something to the front of the sentence, but your verb is too heavy.

Lauren: Thank you, “do.”

Gretchen: English has ended up down this interesting historical pathway, but that means that when you go to learn another language from English, you’re always saying, “All right. Well, I’m really, really confident it’s not gonna do the ‘do’ thing that English does for arcane historical reasons.” It’s gonna do something else – a more normal thing, like intonation or having a question particle.

Lauren: This is also true for our other main type of question. Our first type of question was “Do you have the time?” Yes-no, kind of forced-choice answer. Our second type of question asks for a more open but particular piece of information like, “What is the time?” or “When are you coming over?”

Gretchen: These questions use words like, “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” and “how,” which are often called “wh-words” in English because most of them, except for “how,” begin with W-H. Linguists sometimes refer to these questions as “wh-questions” for that reason, which is super a piece of terminology that doesn’t really hold up across other languages, but it’s easy to remember, so we’re gonna keep it for now.

Lauren: For English questions like, “What time is it?”, “Where are we meeting?”, that wh-word is always at the start of the question that you’re asking.

Gretchen: I feel like we’re arranging a secret assignment or something like that. You know, “Where are we gonna be? Will you have the letter? And what time? Where? Who’s gonna meet us?”

Lauren: I thought we were just catching up for coffee and cake. You have a much more sinister-minded motive behind all these questions than I do.

Gretchen: I like to think of my cake assignations as very important, yes.

Lauren: But we’re putting all those wh-words at the start, regardless of the nature of the appointment that we’re keeping.

Gretchen: In principle, right, these wh-words are at the beginning in questions in English, you know, “Who’s gonna be there?”, “What time?” But also, the answers to all of those have the answer towards the end of the sentence. So, “You are WHERE?” “You’re at the café.” “Let’s meet WHEN?” “Let’s meet at 2 o’clock.” You’re meeting WHO?” “We’re meeting our friends, the secret agents, obviously.” Just for a fun little secret agent tea and cake.

Lauren: Which is a possible but not the typical way of asking these questions as well and really just shows that the information doesn’t always have to be at the start even though we tend to put it at the start for a question structure.

Gretchen: A lot of European languages like to do this thing where those wh-words, which don’t begin with W-H in more of these other languages, go to the beginning of the sentence. But not all the Indo-European languages because the Indic languages – so Hindi, I think Nepali, as well, probably a lot of languages in that area – don’t allow you to move those wh-words to the beginning of the sentence.

Lauren: That’s right. In Nepali, the wh-words are K-words. If we’d started with Nepali grammarians doing the world’s linguistic diversity, we’d be talking about “K-words.”

Gretchen: You know, to be honest, in Indo-European in general, a lot of these words begin with a K sound or a Q-U or a C. This would be a lot more typologically valid, at least for one language family. It’s just very English-centric that we’re talking about wh-words instead of, like, KW-words, which is the more, at least for one very large language family, accurate way of talking about them.

Lauren: In Nepali, if you say, “Hāmī kahām̐ bhēṭauṁ,” that “kahām̐” is “where.” “Hāmī kyāphē bhēṭauṁ,” “We meet at the café.” You don’t change the word order at all which, again, is a lot more of a simple solution than English’s moving of it.

Gretchen: I had to, interestingly, sort of unlearn this in French because in school in French, you learn, “Oh, yeah, you move all those wh-words, the “Q-U words,” to the beginning of the sentence,” which is still the formal French way to do it, but in conversation, most of the time, people don’t actually move them, and you sound more natural if you don’t move them. There’re some languages where it’s sort of optional, like French. There’re some languages where you really do move them almost all the time, like in English, and then there’re some languages really nobody ever moves them at all, and that’s more like Nepali.

Lauren: I like the slight outrage that comes with English if you don’t move it. Like, “You are WHERE?” Like, “I’m outraged that you’re not at the café where we’re meant to be meeting.

Gretchen: That’s similar to how in English if you’re asking yes-no questions just with intonation, “You LIKE cake?” It sounds sort of incredulous or like you expect a particular direction of the answer rather than being a default strategy that is more pragmatically unmarked or more pragmatically neutral.

Lauren: Once again, it’s worth just pointing out that English has the less common way of doing questions. In the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures there’re more than twice as many languages where moving the wh-word to the front is not what’s done. There’re a lot of languages that do it, but not all, and by no stretch of the imagination.

Gretchen: Also, that sometimes we move for wh-questions in English both the “do” and the wh-word. So, if you’re saying something like, “Why don’t you come?”, you’ve got a “do” in there, like we saw earlier, and you’ve got a wh-word. Again, the “do” thing, that’s just not what other languages do.

Lauren: It’s like English was designed to keep syntax people really busy and happy. That’s my theory.

Gretchen: Speaking of things that keep syntacticians really happy, there’s another thing you can do for questions. This is maybe my favourite question thing because they’re so versatile, and they’re fun, and you can do lots of things with them. They’re a little bit more flexible. These are tag questions.

Lauren: Ooo, they sound fun!

Gretchen: This is when you have a main sentence, like a normal sentence, and then you can add a little extra thing at the end to make into a question that is sort of tacked on, like a little tag on a piece of clothing, to make it more question-y. The classic, very formal English example is saying something like, “Isn’t it?” So, “It’s cold, isn’t it?”

Lauren: “Tag questions are interesting, aren’t they?”

Gretchen: Right. But there’s more fun versions. You can say, “It’s cold out, right?”

Lauren: Ah, yeah, it’s doing the same thing with an even shorter tag.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think it’s that little pause, maybe, before the tag question that distinguishes it from you just have a question word that’s the default way of asking a question because “It’s cold out, right?” or “It’s cold out, isn’t it?”, again, sort of expects an answer in a particular direction and has this little pause before it. One of my favourites from the Britishism department is the contraction of “isn’t it” which is “innit?”

Lauren: Ah, yes.

Gretchen: So, “It’s cold, innit?” I’m probably not saying that as Britishly as people who actually have that in their native dialects do.

Lauren: I like that “innit” has just become so stable and contracted that you can use it in a variety of places where you’d have to have a different tag for something else. Like, “Tag questions are interesting, innit?” which, again, I am absolutely not the right kind of British English speaker to pull that off, whereas with the full tag I needed to say, “aren’t they,” and have the “aren’t” match the plural of tag questions. “Innit” has just become its own solid little tag by itself.

Gretchen: Which is, again, the cool thing about tags is that you can just keep putting stuff in tags because they’re sort of more versatile or flexible. English is stuck with this weird “do” situation for complicated historic reasons, but you can just keep innovating and make “innit,” and it’s really fun. Another fun tag question is in Japanese. The tag question form is “ne.”

Lauren: Oh, that’s definitely a thing I hear in Japanese TV shows.

Gretchen: I’ve seen speculation online that the “ne” in Japanese is somehow related to Portuguese, which also has a tag question in “ne,” which comes from “isn’t it?”, like, “Não é?” But unfortunately, I looked up this etymology, and it seems like this is an accident. This is just convergent evolution. Sometimes things resemble each other, and they’re not actually related. It would’ve been cool if it was, but it seems like it’s not.

Lauren: It’s just one of those things where tag questions tend to be really short and reduced and get shorter as people use them more and more. Perhaps unsurprising you get them with the same shape across different languages.

Gretchen: Exactly. I think I need to say my favourite tag question as a Canadian is obviously “eh,” Canadian “eh.”

Lauren: Oh, yeah, of course.

Gretchen: Which is a very short and reduced form. Obviously, it’s just one vowel. The cool thing about “eh” is that it’s a bit different from how other tag questions are used in English because other tag questions in English, you can’t put them on sentences that are already questions.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: So, if you say something like, “Did you see the game last night, did you?”

Lauren: [Laughs] You sound very insistent, but it definitely doesn’t feel like a tag question.

Gretchen: Right. Or “What are you trying to say, are you?”

Lauren: Okay, that definitely does not work.

Gretchen: That just crashes, yeah. Or using “right” for your tag question, “Did you see the game last night, right?”

Lauren: Okay, that works as a tag question in the examples we had before and not there because it’s a question already.

Gretchen: But “eh” can be added to both yes-no questions and wh-questions, and it’s still okay. So, “Did you see the game last night, eh?” This is fine for me.

Lauren: That sounds like a thing a Canadian would say. I perhaps don’t have the best intuitions about this.

Gretchen: Or “What are you trying to say, eh?” This also sounds totally fine to my Canadian ears. This is something that’s sort of unique about “eh” that it can also be added as a tag question to another question where most tag questions in English don’t let you do that.

Lauren: Oh, it’s very flexible.

Gretchen: Isn’t it great, eh?

Lauren: The other cool thing about questions, as well as their intonation and their grammar, is how they get really interesting when we look at how they’re used in the conversation context.

Gretchen: Ah! You know, like my hobby.

Lauren: Which is?

Gretchen: Well, it’s interpreting the semantic structure of a question while ignoring the pragmatic context.

Lauren: Ah, can you give me an example of that?

Gretchen: Yes. [Pause]

Lauren: Okay, you’ve established that you could give me an example of that, and I feel like by not volunteering the example when I ask that question and treating it as a yes-no question with no other requests for information has really proven your point, good job.

Gretchen: I really have ignored the pragmatic context which is often people asking a yes-no question and they’re looking for an answer that’s longer than just yes or no. I didn’t come up with this. This is a meme that makes its way around the internet in various formats. I think it’s really great though.

Lauren: A self-evidencing example is always a true delight.

Gretchen: Absolutely. This idea that, oftentimes, when we’re asking what seems to be a yes-no question, we’re actually expecting, and often providing, more information than that made me feel really validated in a thread on Twitter from the linguist Liz Stokoe, who pointed out that when you actually look at questions in the wild in use in corpora, oftentimes people actually do answer a yes-no question with more than just “Yes” or “No” in response.

Lauren: Because, as we’ve just established, to not do so comes across really dry and unhelpful in the conversation.

Gretchen: Right. A few examples that she has from context: “Do you have pets?”

Lauren: I mean, my answer is “No,” but then I feel like I have to give you the reason why we don’t have pets based on various factors. Even with a “No,” I already feel like I’m opening up more about that.

Gretchen: The answer in her corpus is “Yes, two cats,” which I know you don’t have two cats, but that’s the kind of thing that people say when they do have pets.

Lauren: I was gonna read from your script, and then I was like, “But then people will think I have two cats, and I don’t, for, like, complicated reasons. It’s not that I don’t like pets.” Here we go. But yeah, as soon as someone says, “Two cats,” you go, “Ah, do they hang out together?” Suddenly, you have an in to asking more questions because people always love to talk about their pets.

Gretchen: The same thing with asking someone do they have kids. People will often start talking about specifically their kids and their ages and these sorts of things rather than just say, “Yes” or “No” in a very blunt sort of way.

Lauren: If I call up and say, “Can I make an appointment?”, at the hairdressers, they’re not just gonna say, “Yes,” and then that’s it. They’re going to be like, “Yes, when are you available? What would you like to have done?”

Gretchen: Especially when the answer is a little bit more dis-preferred, if it’s something that you feel a bit socially awkward about. Stokoe has this example with a salesperson and a client saying, “And do you have internet access at all, Mr. Jones?” And the client says, “Uh, yeah, the wife’s got a laptop.” That really conveys some particular things about Mr. Jones and his relationship to the internet which is like he’s sort of online but maybe not very online rather than just “Yes, technically, there’s internet access in the household.”

Lauren: He doesn’t seem to be really looking for it there.

Gretchen: There’s actually a really great example, also from Stokoe’s corpus, about someone doing this very literal “Yes” answer to yes-no questions in a way that makes the other person prod for information.

Lauren: Okay, should we do a little radio play of it?

Gretchen: Yeah. So, this is in a café. You have a café customer, café staff, and the customer says, “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

Lauren: “Yes, we do.”

Gretchen: “Uh, can customers use it?”

Lauren: “Yes, they can.”

Gretchen: “Do I need a code or…?”

Lauren: Apparently, according to this, I point to the place on the wall where the code is.

Gretchen: “Uh, thanks.” Most of the time, I think, when a customer says, “Do you have Wi-Fi?”, they’re saying, “And how do I get on it?” or “What’s the password?” not just, “Yep, okay. So, I can use it. Okay, but like, how do I do that?”

Lauren: That really strikes me as a staff member who is very sick of pointing to the sign. And you see how immediately unhelpful that is. I feel like this research and these observations are really helpful because I feel like there’s a kind of teaching you how to do conversation that’s like, “Ask open questions. These yes-no questions really trap people into locked answers.”

Gretchen: And if we actually analyse what people are doing in conversation, it turns out that asking a yes-no question, people will often continue volunteering information or provide a springboard for doing that rather than saying to somebody, you know, “Do you have kids, and if so, how many, and what are their ages?”, saying, “Do you have kids?”, will often lead people into volunteering how many and what their ages are and these sorts of additions onto the questions. There’s this post about using yes-no questions in a psychotherapy context where you’re trying to have people open up, but sometimes saying, “Do you feel this particular way?”, can be a way of someone talking about their feelings more or even asking a question like, “Can you tell me more?”, which in its form looks like it’s kind of a yes-no question. You know, “Can you tell me more?” “Yes.” Now, I’m gonna stop talking. It probably, actually, has the effect of saying, “I’d like you to tell me more. Please tell me more,” but sometimes phrased in a more polite way. Getting really hung up on the difference between the sort of, “Oh, you have to ask questions with wh-words in them because that’s the only kind of open question” doesn’t actually seem to be how conversation is structured if you look at what people are actually doing.

Lauren: In fact, the more important thing is just to think about who is likely to have information and who has the right to ask questions and who has the right to answer questions.

Gretchen: This brings us to a really interesting thing that speakers of Yélî Dnye do, which is a language spoken in Rossel Island of Papua New Guinea. They don’t use the structural things that we talked about to mark a question, whether that’s a question word or changing the word order, but they use instead a deep understanding of the social context. They don’t use question intonation either.

Lauren: That’s all the strategies we’ve discussed so far for having ways or rearranging or adding words or using intonation to mark questions. Their questions really are identical to statements.

Gretchen: But people can still tell if a question is being asked because of the informational mismatch between what you think the other person is likely to know. If you assume the person you’re speaking to has a younger brother, but you’re not sure, you want them to confirm it, you could say something like, “You have a younger brother,” to which they could reply, “Yes, I do” or “No, I don’t,” because in context you know that they are a higher authority of whether or not they have a younger brother than you are probably.

Lauren: Yeah. The “You have pets” would obviously come across as a question because I know who’s in my household more than you do.

Gretchen: Right. If I talk about somebody’s internal states, you know, “You’re hungry,” that actually means “Are you hungry?” because how could I know whether you’re hungry or not except if you tell me.

Lauren: It reminds me a little bit of how questions get asked that use evidentials. In Lamjung Yolmo and the other languages I’ve worked with, which is that you have to ask a question of someone, and they have to answer with whether they know because they saw something or because they heard about it. You ask the question by using the form of evidence you think they’re most likely to have based on their experience. You have to keep track of whether this person has the likelihood of answering a question and what evidence they’re gonna use to answer the question with.

Gretchen: So, this is something like, if you’re saying, “Do you know if someone’s still around?” or “Do you think they’re still around?” or “Have you seen this person recently?” like, whether they’re likely to know?

Lauren: Whether they’re likely to know because they saw the person or heard. Or a really good example is the difference between “Are you hungry?” or “Is she hungry?” where, if I ask you if you’re hungry, I’m gonna use, “Do you have personal experience of the hunger?”, whereas if I ask about someone else, “Is this other person hungry? Have you been told?”

Gretchen: Right. Because I wouldn’t be able to experience that directly. This sounds like it might be useful in talking especially about people in social situations. I wanna say, like, “Did they have a nice party?”, there’s a difference between whether you think I was there at the party having direct experience of it being nice or whether I simply heard about it after it happened, and I think it went really well.

Lauren: Yeah. And it’s not that we aren’t aware of this in English as well, it’s just that we’re forced to make a grammatical choice in these languages with evidential systems that shows up this information asymmetry or access to information in a different way.

Gretchen: Whereas in English, doing so is optional. Like, you can do it, but you don’t have to.

Lauren: Yeah. And if I asked, “Did they have a nice party?” and you say, “Oh, I didn’t go, but someone else said it was great,” I’d be like, “Ah, okay.” I might’ve asked because I thought you’d been there.

Gretchen: Right. It sort of embeds what your assumptions are.

Lauren: I found the way that people do questions in conversation so interesting that I spent a whole chapter of my thesis thinking about questions in the grammar and conversations of Lamjung Yolmo, and I think it is because they bring together the phonetics with the intonation patterns and the grammar with the word choices and the word order and, unescapably, the conversational context for how people make the choices of the types of questions they ask and the types of questions that they give.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get linguistics merch, including our new, elegant redesign of the IPA on posters, mugs, and t-shirts at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include doing child language research in more languages, an interview with Liz McCullough about how linguistics interacts with science communication, and a discussion of how we re-designed the layout of the International Phonetic Alphabet to make it look really cool and put it on lots of cool items that you can get as gifts or for yourself. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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