Investigating the Communicative Functions of Interrogative Sentences in Dialogue Texts

Abstract

The article aims to study the problem of the peculiarities of the communicative functions of interrogative sentences. The relevance of the problem is connected with the rich pragmatic fullness of these linguistic units. The issue of communicative functions of interrogative sentences was considered from the theory of speech acts, in which they are realized. Thus, examples of interrogatives were analyzed in representative, directive, commission, and expressive speech acts based on dialogues from the sitcom “Big Bang Theory”. Determining the quantitative ratio of interrogatives in the composition of different types of speech acts and comparing these statistics with the results of another study allowed the authors to decide the most productive types. The prospect of further research is a more in-depth study of the pragmatics of interrogative sentences, as well as interdisciplinary research.