Context and Form: Declarative or Interrogative, That Is the Question

Questions in spoken dialogues are often uttered in a declarative form. In more than 50% the question function of these utterances cannot be recognized without contex-tual features. Therefore, a speaker must, at the risk of misunderstanding, have special reasons for using a declarative form instead of an interrogative one. Two experiments were carried out to determine the contextual features that contribute to the use of a declarative question. Dialogues were presented on paper in both experiments. In the rst experiment, subjects had to indicate whether a question in the dialogue was originally used in a declarative or an interrogative form; in the second, the subjects had to estimate the speaker's certainty about the correctness of the propositional content of the questions in the rst experiment. The experimental results indicate that declaratives are often used for questioning if the speaker wants to verify information already provided in the dialogue and that the use of declaratives signiicantly correlates with the speaker's degree of certainty about the propositional content of the question. Moreover, from the experimental results it is hypothesized that abrupt changes of topic may decrease the use of declaratives.