Questions in Estonian Information Dialogues. Part I: Form of Questions Cover Image

Küsimused eestiKeelses infodialoogis I. Küsimuste vorm
Questions in Estonian Information Dialogues. Part I: Form of Questions

Author(s): Mare Koit, Riina Kasterpalu, Andriela Rääbis, Olga Gerassimenko, Tiit Hennoste, Krista Strandson
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: SA Kultuurileht
Keywords: typology of questions; linguistic form of questions; dialogue corpus; spoken Estonian

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this study is to explain how questions are formed and used in spoken Estonian. The study is based on the Estonian dialogue Corpus and consists of two parts: the first part, presented in the current paper, considers the form of interrogative utterances. The second part will explore the functions of questions in spoken dialogues and their relations with the linguistic form. The present paper introduces a few typologies of questions. a fundamental typology of Estonian interrogative sentences has been worked out by Helle Metslang (1981). The typology departs from standard Estonian and is based on logic. auli Hakulinen et al (2004) propose a typology of Finnish interrogative constructions, where both written and spoken Finnish are taken into account. The authors of the current paper have worked out an empirical typology of questions, which is based on the study of spoken Estonian dialogues. The paper sets up relations between several typologies and investigates how different types of questions are expressed in spoken Estonian.

  • Issue Year: LII/2009
  • Issue No: 05
  • Page Range: 341-359
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Estonian