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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 33:1 (2023) ► pp.124–153

‘That is very important, isn’t it?’

Content-oriented questions in British and Montenegrin university lectures

ORCID logo | University of Montenegro
This study explores the use of content-oriented questions in British and Montenegrin university lectures. It examines their formal realisation, their frequency and their contextual functions, as well as the differences and similarities related to these questions between British linguistics lectures taken from the standard British corpora, and a specially compiled corpus of Montenegrin linguistics lectures. Compared to previous studies on content-oriented questions, one modified and five new functions are revealed, alongside one new formal realisation. The main differences between the corpora include the greater frequency of content-oriented questions in the Montenegrin lectures and a new questioning realisation, found only in the Montenegrin corpus, which is potentially attributable to differences between academic cultures. The major similarities relate to the use of the four most common question forms, which perform the same contextual functions. This contrastive study thus provides insights into the additional communicative functions and forms of content-oriented questions in university lectures.
Keywords: university lectures, linguistics lectures, British lectures, Montenegrin lectures, questions, content-oriented questions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The theoretical background
    • 2.1An overview of studies on questions in academic lectures
    • 2.2The current study and research questions
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Analysis
      • 3.2.1Question forms
      • 3.2.2Question functions
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Tag questions
    • 4.2Wh-questions
    • 4.3Yes/no questions
    • 4.4Questions with a question word/phrase at the end
    • 4.5Multiple questions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20052.ziv
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