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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2018

Focus on repetition: On the role of focus and repetition in echo questions

From the book Exact Repetition in Grammar and Discourse

  • Claudia Poschmann

Abstract

The repetition of a preceding utterance can serve very different functions in discourse, from signaling comprehension and acknowledgment of a previous utterance to initiating discourse repair strategies. In this paper, I focus on a very special phenomenon of repetition in discourse, namely echo questions. Investigating the restrictions holding on the relation between echo questions and their preceding utterances, I argue against a grammatical (phonetic or syntactic) analysis and for a rather weak pragmatic discourse based analysis of repetition in echo questions.

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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