When ‘yes’ is not enough – as an answer to a yes/no question

Jakob Steensig | Aarhus University

Trine Heinemann | University of Southern Denmark

This article investigates confirming answers to yes/no questions that consist of more than the type-conforming ‘yes’ token. The study is based on 160 cases of question-answer sequences with confirming answers, taken from a corpus of Danish interactions. The authors claim that certain actions, which are carried out as yes/no questions, demand a response unit that consists of ‘yes’ plus an elaboration. The actions that have this far-reaching projection are: (1) expansion-eliciting questions, (2) knowledge discrepancy questions, and (3) specification requests. The authors found no simple relationship between syntax and action. Some of the actions that demand more than a ‘yes’ can be carried out with both interrogative and declarative syntax, whereas others are done only interrogatively. Keywords: yes/no questions; responses; confirmations; elaborations

Published online: 22 October 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.25.07ste

Cited by

Cited by other publications

No author info given

2021. In OKAY across Languages [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 34],

Drake, Veronika

2020. Alternative questions and their responses in English interaction. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)

Heinemann, Trine

2017. Receipting Answers That are Counter to Expectations: The Polar Question-Answer-NåSequence in Danish. Research on Language and Social Interaction 50:3 ► pp. 249 ff.

Heinemann, Trine & Jakob Steensig

2018. In Between Turn and Sequence [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 31], ► pp. 445 ff.

Kurhila, Salla & Inkeri Lehtimaja

2019. Dealing with numbers: Nurses informing doctors and patients about test results. Discourse Studies 21:2 ► pp. 180 ff.

Pizarro Pedraza, Andrea

2019. MadSex: collecting a spoken corpus of indirectly elicited sexual concepts. Language Resources and Evaluation 53:1 ► pp. 191 ff.

Rasmussen, Gitte

2016. Repeated use of request for confirmation in atypical interaction. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 30:10 ► pp. 849 ff.

Steensig, Jakob & Trine Heinemann

2015. Opening Up Codings?. Research on Language and Social Interaction 48:1 ► pp. 20 ff.

Szczepek Reed, Beatrice

2015. Managing the Boundary Between “Yes” and “But”: Two Ways of Disaffiliating With Germanja aberandjaber. Research on Language and Social Interaction 48:1 ► pp. 32 ff.

Zhang Waring, Hansun, Elizabeth Reddington, Di Yu & Ignasi Clemente

2018. Going general: Responding to yes–no questions in informational webinars for prospective grant applicants. Discourse & Communication 12:3 ► pp. 307 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 november 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.