Question about answers

[Siva Kalyan]

If you count nods of the head as an "interjection-type answer", I doubt
you'd find any language that's purely of type B.

Does anyone know of cross-cultural research on gestures expressing
affirmation or negation? Specifically, whether there's any culture that
lacks them?

Siva

2010/1/2 Nick Enfield <Nick.Enfield at mpi.nl>

>  Happy new year everyone -
>
> Colleagues and I are comparing how polar questions are answered in various
> languages. There appear to be two basic types of strategy for answering a
> polar question such as 'Is John working today?': 1. with an 'interjection
> answer' such as "yes", "no", "of course", or 2. with a 'repetitional answer'
> (modifiable in various ways) such as "John is working today", "He's
> working", "He is". This suggests three possible types of system for a
> language:
>
> A. Interjection only: the language has no 'repetitional' type strategy, and
> it is only possible to answer by saying things like ‘Yes’.
>
> B. Repetitional only: the language has no 'interjection' type strategy, and
> it is only possible to answer by saying things like ‘He is’.
>
> C. Mixed. The language makes both strategies available (and the frequencies
> of use of one or the other alternative may vary across languages of this
> type)
>
> QUESTION. Does anybody know of any claims that there are languages with
> systems A or B? It does not seem possible that System A exists, since
> presumably all languages can provide speakers with a way to take the
> proposition that was coded in the question and simply assert it as a way of
> answering (i.e., repeat in declarative form for 'yes', or with negation for
> 'no'). There does, however, seem to be a common view that System B occurs.
> We have heard it said, for example, that Celtic languages like Welsh have no
> interjection strategy, but this is clearly not the case for Welsh itself, as
> shown by Bob Morris Jones in his book 'The Welsh Answering System'. In that
> book, Jones cites other languages as having repeat-only strategies (Gaelic,
> Breton) but he is not able to present sufficient data to establish that
> there is really no way to answer a polar question with an interjection type
> answer. (Note that under ‘interjection type answer’ we would include items
> like ‘yep’, ‘uh-huh’, ‘mm’, and nods of the head.)
>
> I would much appreciate any references to literature in which it is shown,
> or claimed, that a language has no means of answering a polar question with
> an interjection type strategy (functionally equivalent to 'yes' and 'no' in
> English), meaning that a 'repetitional' answer is the only means for
> answering a polar question.
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Nick Enfield
>
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