OLAC Record oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/74808

Metadata
Title:		Polar questions in Arapaho: Confronting challenges of documentation and description
Bibliographic Citation:		2025-03; Article; Kaipuleohone University of Hawai'i Digital Language Archive;https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74808.
Date (W3CDTF):		2025-03
Description:		This paper examines polar questions in Arapaho, from several perspectives. First, examples are given of consultants’ elicited Arapaho glosses for Englishlanguage questions, along with consultant commentary and language ideologies on the proper forms. Of note is the consultants’ preference for negative polar questions. Next, a series of native-speaker-produced bilingual curricular materials are examined, considered as idealized question models outside the context of a specific focus on polar questions. Again, negative versus positive polar questions are compared. Following is a study of polar questions in conversation. Finally, we offer a close examination of one variety of polar questions – requests for verification – using a conversationanalytic approach to examine positive and negative polar questions. The speakers’ generalized ideologies about the preferability of negative polar questions are not supported by the corpus data. However, the data show that there is a preference for negative polar questions in situations where otherwise dispreferred responses may occur. Secondarily, use of negative questions is linked to politeness behaviors, where allowance for a dispreferred or negative response is a key feature of question construction. The study then notes that consultants seem to interpret elicited polar questions as potentially referring to very generalized public audiences. Without overtly saying so, they default to the “safest” and most “polite” usage – negative polar questions. The paper illustrates the challenges of elicitation in the domain of pragmatics, the varying outcomes one gets from variable data sources and methodologies, and the value of micro-level and multi-modal analysis of natural conversation.
		National Foreign Language Resource Center
Format:		Article
		23
Identifier:		Cowell, Andrew, Chase Raymond, Maisa Nammari. 2025. Polar questions in Arapaho: Confronting challenges of documentation and description. Language Documentation & Conservation 19: 1-23.
		1934-5275
Identifier (URI):		https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74808
Language:		English
Language (ISO639):		eng
Publisher:		University of Hawaii Press
Table Of Contents:		Cowell_etal.pdf
OLAC Info
Archive:		Language Documentation and Conservation
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/ldc.scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu:10125/74808
DateStamp:		2025-03-04
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		n.a. 2025. University of Hawaii Press.
Terms:		area_Europe country_GB iso639_eng