Developing an interactional model for question production: Evidence from Scots dialects

What we say does not always map directly to what we mean. Even seemingly simple sentences can be loaded with additional layers of complex social and interactional meaning. Speakers and hearers must be attuned to these layers of meaning in order to successfully build a dialogue.

Questions are one instance where this happens frequently: seemingly straightforward constructions in which the speaker simply wishes to find out some information can carry out additional purposes: e.g. indicating the speaker has an existing belief about the answer. For example, by asking the question 'Won't you be late?', the speaker indicates that they believe that you will be late. These questions are used especially when something in the immediate context is challenging the speaker's belief, such as that you seem to be making a cup of tea.

We therefore know that the speaker's belief and the context surrounding the interaction, two discourse/pragmatic factors, can affect what type of question is produced. This has been shown to be relevant to question production cross-linguistically.

However, are these the only factors that constrain this production choice? How about the speaker's desires, or what the hearer is expected to know? Once the context for the choice of these questions has been established, there is then a further question as to how these meanings are communicated to the hearer. Do hearers simply infer them from their own interpretation of the knowledge they share with the speaker, or are these meanings encoded into the structure of the question itself when the speaker produces it?

In this research, I will build on the work that I carried out in my PhD that explored these questions in two Scots dialects. In my PhD, I gathered data from speakers in Glasgow and Shetland to show that the variation we see in the syntax of these questions in these dialects is a result of variation in the discourse/pragmatic factors that permit their production. Furthermore, I made theoretical predictions about the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic content of these questions. In this fellowship, I will test these predictions using experimental methodologies in standard English in order to address these questions further, and will produce and submit three articles to leading semantics/pragmatics journals over the course of the fellowship that work towards establishing a taxonomy of question types incorporating the different contexts for their usage as well as indicating different ways that they can be encoded.

These three journal articles and the experiments I carry out towards them will also be used as a basis for writing a grant application for the ESRC New Investigator scheme. This grant will use experimental methodologies learned during this fellowship in tandem with my knowledge of Scots dialect variation in order to develop an probabilistic model for question production and comprehension based on discourse/pragmatic factors.

Finally, I will communicate the results of my Scots research to the public in ways which are targeted at the specific linguistic needs of the communities in Glasgow and Shetland by hosting two separate knowledge exchange events. For Scotland as a whole, I will also work to improve teaching in Scots at both secondary and primary level, targeting a worksheet resource at learners at the Scots Language Award level as well as a CPD session for primary teachers about incorporating grammatical varation into the primary curriculum.