Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
In Figure 2 we see quite clearly that when Taipei and Peking
speakers wish to express an affirmative rhetorical question, their
preferences are not the same. Taipei speakers show a very strong
inclination to use tag questions, while Peking speakers show a fairly
even division between the two, and if there is any preference at all,
it is for BA or some other sentence-final particle.
Figure 2. Distribution of Affirmative Rhetorical Yes-No Questions
by Pattern & City
Pattern Taipei Peking Total
Total
ChiSq = 3.972 + 3.928 + 6.299 + 6.229 = 20.429
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The data contained within this study convincingly demonstrates
that although Taipei and Peking speakers essentially share the same
syntactic repertoire for expressing yes-no questions, the two speech
communities differ from one another in terms of which form or
forms they prefer. When the question is pragmatically neutral,
Taipei speakers prefer the explicit syntactic marking of the A-not-A
form, while Peking speakers prefer sentence intonation + MA, or
sentence intonation alone to perform this function. Consistent with
this dichotemy between expressing a yes-no question either through
an A-not-A structure or by means of a sentence-final particle, when
the speaker possesses a strong assumption as to what the proper
answer ought to be, Taipei speakers once again show a strong
preference for the disjunctive form while Peking speakers continue
to favor a sentence-final particle.