The point of departure (and incentive) for this paper was Enfield et al.’s (2019) cross-linguistic study on ‘polar answers’. By this, they mean the answers to polar interrogatives, focusing on ‘interjection-type answers’ like yes, mhm, head nods, etc., and ‘repetition-type answers’ that fully or partially repeat the question. Based on everyday interactional data from fourteen, typologically diverse, languages, Enfield et al. (2019) found that, although both options are available in all languages examined, the interjection-type answers made out at least 80% of all answers in eleven out of the fourteen languages. Such answers semantically code the meaning ‘I answer and confirm that the proposition you put on the table is true’, while pragmatically indicating – through their sequential position – what this proposition is (Enfield et al. 2019, 284). This particular semantic-pragmatic design of the interjection-type answers makes them better fitted to serve as “an unmarked answer type, regardless of cultural or linguistic context” (Enfield et al. 2019, 289), by contrast to pragmatically marked answers.

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