Request for confirmation sequences in Yurakaré

Abstract

This article describes the resources employed by speakers of Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia) for formulating and responding to requests for confirmation (RfCs). In Yurakaré, RfC turns are predominantly formatted with positive polarity and falling final intonation. Confirming responses to positive polarity RfCs and disconfirming responses to negative polarity RfCs with truth-conditional negation show a preference for repeat format. Moreover, Yurakaré exhibits a functional differentiation of repeat vs response token format in confirming responses to positive polarity RfCs, a repeat being the default format for plain confirmations of RfCs that introduce a new proposition into the discourse. The Yurakaré data presented in this article contribute to our knowledge of the cross-linguistic response possibility space, providing evidence for the capability of repeats to convey plain and unmarked confirming responses, contesting theories of interaction that propose response tokens to universally constitute the unmarked format for confirming responses across languages.

Keywords

• polar questions
• other-repeats
• response possibility space
• response tokens