Pursuing Common Ground: Nondisaffiliative Rhetorical Questions in Mandarin Conversations

Rhetorical questions have been regularly observed to implement disaffiliative actions in conversations such as challenging, complaining, or retorting. This article, however, reports on nondisaffiliative uses of rhetorical questions based on a particular structure in Mandarin, bushi … ma, which can serve as a conventional question, a disaffiliative rhetorical question, or a nondisaffiliative rhetorical question. Although much less studied, nondisaffiliative uses are by far more frequent in conversations. Integrating discourse-functional linguistics and conversation analysis, this study argues that nondisaffiliative bushi … ma rhetorical questions work to pursue common ground so as to move the activity-in-progress forward. Moreover, it examines the sequential contexts in which they are recurrently produced and identifies the interactional clues—epistemic, sequential, prosodic—that make these rhetorical questions recognizable as seeking common ground. This article contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical question as a grammatical device that maximizes intersubjectivity in conversation, further confirming the mutual influence between grammar and social interaction. Data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.