Indirect responses in natural conversation

By indirect answers we mean answers to general questions which do not correspond to “yes” and “no”, and answers to special questions which do not literally correlate with the question words who, what, where, etc. The article examines the types of indirect responses in different structural and semantic types of dialogue. The article analyzes the features of indirect answers determined by the predictive relationship of concepts: place-goal, place-time, etc. Particular attention is paid to answers containing assessment, not determineded by the content of questions, as well as question-answer turns with why and what for.
The article focuses on the informative volume of indirect answers, their insufficiency and redundancy. Indirect questions are used rather frequently. It is not possible to classify all of them, but all of them are undoubtedly associated with certain types of dialogue, speech genres, speech situations and with the psychological type of communication partners. As noted earlier, the logical connection of the categories place-goal, placetime, goal-cause, etc. leads to reversibility and predictability of situations, and in certain speech genres to the interchangeability of designating categories in the form of indirect answers.
A specific feature of the dialogue, observed in different speech genres, is the response containing the characteristic of the person mentioned in the question, instead of the information in which the speaker is interested. The analysis of these responses reveals the organic connection between the evaluation and the reason. The use of counter-questions, and first of all, why- and what for-remarks, is caused by the specific nature of this phenomenon, which, despite the thorough research of N. D. Arutyunova, allows to see some interesting features in it.
The article uses recordings of oral speech and some works of fiction, reproducing spoken dialogue.