La strategia del questioning nell’interazione dialogica: verso una definizione di continua pragmatico-funzionali

This work investigates the Questioning strategy within dialogic speech, considered the prototypical form of verbal interaction. In order to implement this communicative strategy, speakers need both to take care of the interlocutor’s interpersonal needs and to convey the propositional content relevant to specific communicative aims (in our case, the solution of a task). Therefore, we present an analysis of the following two dimensions in which interlocutors are involved: an interactional (-relational) level and a task-oriented level. The strategies adopted in both levels are mostly related to the idiosyncratic characteristics of each speaker and depend on social, cultural, relational and situational factors too. In spite of all this variability, we present some functional-pragmatic continua as a viable and reliable means of accounting for the dynamics of the Questioning strategy. The main need to communicate a specific message to reach a common goal, on the one hand, and the effort to maintain the relationship with the interlocutor, on the other hand, act simultaneously, but they often play as opposite forces: in many cases the second one seems to integrate or mitigate the first one.