An Integrated Methodology for Identifying and Classifying Questions and Answers in Spoken Conversation

Abstract Questions provide speakers with a means of managing turn-taking, demonstrating engagement, and giving the communicative ‘floor’ to their interlocutor, among a range of other functions. When English interrogatives function as direct questions, they are typically identifiable via their subject-verb inversion (regardless of communication mode). When spoken, we can also look for rising intonation and, when written—including when written as part of speech-related transcripts—the illocutionary force indicating device (hereafter, IFID) of the question mark can signal a question. Direct answers become identifiable, in turn, if we assume they immediately follow the relevant interrogative. Historically, speech-related studies of questions and answers have identified them manually or semi-automatically. More recently, a growing body of work has begun to suggest ways of automating these processes. Limited attention has been paid to date to the identification of indirect questions, nonetheless. This paper addresses this gap. We report on the application of an integrated methodology, combining Archer’s (2005) classification of questions and answers with Curry’s (2023) approach to direct and indirect question identification, focusing on comparable British and Irish English spoken corpora. Our paper thus provides insights into the relationship between questions and (expectations of) answers, the affordances of initiation-related IFIDs for pragmatic annotation, and similarities and differences in questioning and answering practices in these two English language varieties.