tailieunhanh - The grammar book teacher course part 32

Using language grammatically and being able to communicate are not the same, but they are both important goals. Thus, the language teaching field would be well served by finding a way to help learners accomplish both (Celce-Murcia 1992; Iarsen-Freeman 1992). | Chapter 11 Yes No Questions 213 If do is the operator in the question it is also used in the short answer with the same tense used in the question Does she go there often Yes she does. No she doesn t The Meaning of Yes No Questions Although not all linguists agree cf. Bolinger 1978 most feel that an acceptable paraphrase of a yes no question might be Is it the case thatin which the speaker is asking for confirmation or denial of a proposition. Such an analysis implies that yes no questions arc neutral questions that is there is no presupposition regarding whether an affirmative or negative reply is likely. Chalker 1984 for example calls them open questions because the speaker has an open mind about the answer. Such is not the case with negative yes no questions. Negative Yes No Questions Negative yes no questions have a different orientation. In this example Is Josh playing soccer this year Isn t Josh playing soccer this year The first question is neutral with regard to speaker expectations but the negative question signals that the speaker has reason to believe that something he or she had previously thought was true might not be so. Here in using the negative question the speaker is signaling that he or she expected that Josh would be playing soccer but because of new evidence now realizes that this may not be true. The speaker may be hoping for a positive answer but not really expecting one. Because the prior expectation tends to be aligned with the speaker s wishes Quirk et al. 1985 add that negative questions can express disappointment or annoyance because the speaker s earlier wishes expectations now seem to be no longer true. Aren t we going to the movies I thought we had agreed to. Didn t you say that the test would be next week I thought that was what you had announced. Negative yes no questions create semantic problems for many ESL EFL learners Bevington 1979 . For example native speakers of most Asian and West African languages react to a negative yes no