Basic research on "Question - Answer" pairs from the perspective of Relevance Theory

• Main Authors: Yu-min Lin, 林育民
• Other Authors: Sei-wa Ou
• Format: Others
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/22696734862558186399

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 日本語文學系 === 100 === Besides asking for information from the addressee, the functions of Japanese questions included the questioner's emotion revealing and his/her thinking and opinions of it. The purpose of the research was to know how the addressee understands these questions of different speech functions and how he/she gave appropriate responses. The researcher used Relevance theory addressed by Sperber & Wilson to survey if optimal relevance existed in the talking between the questioner and addressee. First, the researcher divided Japanese questions into "True questions" and "False questions" according to different speech functions, and then used the concepts of adjacency pairs in Conversation Analysis ,to analyze the two kinds of dialogues, " True questions- Responses" and " False questions- Responses". As for the corpus, the researcher adopted "BTS Most Spoken Language Oral Corpus Japanese Conversation" (dialogues between Japanese native speakers). (『BTSによる多言語話し言葉コーパス─日本語会話１（日本語母語話者同士の会話）』)。Subjects　were college students that met each other for the first time. By this setting, the research wanted to know if the conversation between them followed the rules of Cooperative principle addressed by Grice or inclined to Relevance theory which is more economical in expressing. The results showed that in order to make the conversation go smoother and to add more topics, the two participants in the conversation did not follow the Cooperative principle that advocated expressing information effectively. But as for the Relevance theory, the participants would make great effort to keep optimal relevance between questioning and responding in order to make the conversation go smoother, even though this would increase processing effort for each other when understanding the talking. The research has eight chapters in it. Chapter One consists of research method and subjects. Chapter Two illustrates the concepts of Relevance theory and pre-study about it. Chapter Three to Chapter Six is the main of the thesis, which sorts out the characteristics of all phenomena in "True/ False questions- responses", and also probes to see whether the speaking phenomena has correspondence to Relevance theory. In Chapter Seven, the researcher sums up all phenomena that happen in the research and in the conversation of people who meet for the first time. Finally, Chapter Eight draws a conclusion to each chapter and provides suggestions for future study.