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Part of
Responding to Polar Questions across Languages and Contexts
Edited by Galina B. Bolden, John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 35] 2023
► pp. 301–327

Chapter 10
Responding to polar questions without a polarity item ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in Finnish

| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki

Polar questions and their responses have been a subject of increasing interest for conversation analysts. This paper contributes to this research by studying answers to interrogatively formatted polar questions in Finnish that do not contain a separate element for expressing positive or negative polarity. We will show that the answers are used for a range of practices that form a continuum from cases where the polarity is implied to ones where the recipient, in their response, leaves it to the questioner to evaluate the quality of the response. Moving beyond the polarity of the question, these answers focus on what the recipient inferred to be the core relevance of the question, furthering the progressivity of the interaction by sustaining the ongoing project.

Keywords: polar question, polar interrogative, answer, response, implicit polarity, evaluation, co-operation, context, Finnish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Implied polarity
  • 3.From polarity to scalarity
  • 4.Answering requests for evaluation
  • 5.Treating the presuppositions of the question as invalid
  • 6.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.35.10vep
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