Bohemica Olomucensia

The Expression Cože in Spoken and Written Dialogue

The paper examines reactive questions with the expression cože and divides them into a) questions by which the speaker asks the interlocutor to repeat his/her previous turn or part of a turn which the speaker did not understand; b) pragmatically stressed questions which perform the function of the so-called "newsmarks" and express the speaker's amazement, surprise at new information that he or she did not expect, or even his/her doubt, disbelief, disagreement. The research methodology is based on functional-stylistic and pragma-linguistic analysis, the questions with cože were taken from corpora of spoken and written Czech. It was possible to confirm the hypothesis that in spoken everyday conversations the questions aimed at eliminating misunderstanding prevail, while in written texts (especially in fiction) the questions of amazement prevail. We also studied prosodic aspects in spoken discourse: it turns out that "genuine" questions are mostly associated with rising intonation, while questions of amazement with falling intonation.

Keywords: newsmarks; the expression cože; questions aimed at eliminating misunderstanding; questions of amazement; falling and rising intonation