Request for confirmation sequences in Czech

Abstract

This article provides a first description of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in spoken Czech. Based on 204 sequences from video-recorded ordinary conversations, it provides a quantitative overview of the main syntactic, lexical, prosodic and sequential features of both requests for confirmation and their responses. RfCs in Czech are typically of declarative clausal format, realized in positive polarity, and receive a confirmation. The epistemic asymmetry between the speaker of the RfC and their interlocutor seems to be mainly expressed and negotiated by a complex taxonomy of tags appended to the confirmable, response tokens, and syntactically non-minimal responses. These features represent promising topics for future, more qualitatively oriented investigations of RfCs in spoken Czech.