Question-answers in written texts: an analysis in the context of discourse relations

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Amália
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Lejeune, Pierre, Nunes, Carolina
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.26334/2183-9077/rapln7ano2020a14
• topic: PDTB; análise do discurso; par pergunta-resposta; relação discursiva; discourse analysis; question-answer pair; discourse relation; PDTB

Question-answer pairs are typically associated to spoken discourse and to directive speech acts, although they are also found in written texts. We analyse contexts extracted from the CRPC-DB, a written subcorpus annotated with discourse relations in the PDTB-style. We focus on the nature of the question and of the answer in interactional contexts, but also in contexts where a single locutor poses the question and answers it. Contexts of question-answer pairs with a single locutor have a textual function related to the topic-comment structure of the text and involve a virtual locutor and a modalized assertion. We discuss the treatment of question-answer pairs in discourse banks following different theoretical frameworks and make a proposal that integrates these contexts in our annotation scheme. Our results contribute to theoretical proposals that focus on the pragmatic and textual functions of question-answer pairs, and their application to a new resource for the study of discourse in Portuguese.