WHEN A NOD IS AS GOOD AS A WORD - FORM-FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS BETWEENQUESTIONS AND THEIR RESPONSES

It is well established that syntactic form and communicative function do not always correspond: for instance, a syntactic question might fun ction as a request for information (''did you see the play?'') or a re quest for acknowledgment when there is no doubt about polarity of the response (''there's a tower at Blackpool, isn't there''). Using data f rom a corpus of 18 child-adult conversations, we distinguished adult u tterances that solicited information from those soliciting acknowledgm ent (i.e., where the response was predictable, and the utterance serve d a predominantly social function). Both types of utterance were usual ly responded to by children, but the form of response differed accordi ng to the communicative function of the utterance. Nonverbal and proso dic responses (eg, nods or ''mmh'') were significantly more likely to occur in response to utterances soliciting acknowledgment than in resp onse to yes/no questions that solicited information. There were consis tent form-function relationships for responses as well as for soliciti ng utterances. Nonverbal nods and headshakes were not functionally equ ivalent to verbal ''yes'' and ''no.''