The Design and Positioning of Questions in Inquiry Testimony
The Design and Positioning of Questions in Inquiry Testimony
This chapter, written by Jack Sidnell, considers question‐answer sequences in public inquiries, a context in which lawyers are mandated to ask questions and witnesses to answer them. Sidnell shows that while many of the lawyers' turns‐at‐talk do not “do questioning” in any straightforward way, they are nonetheless allowed in these contexts. Conversely, some of the lawyers' turns that are designed as questions (i.e., as interrogatives) are negatively sanctioned as not being questions. Sidnell concludes that it is not question design alone that determines whether turns count as questions; the sequential positioning of turns also plays a role. In particular, Sidnell shows that the negatively sanctioned interrogatives are in fact understood as third‐position comments rather than the first‐position utterances of question‐answer adjacency pairs.
Keywords: public inquiries, question design, sequential positioning, adjacency pairs, lawyer‐witness interaction, interrogative
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .