Fill-in-the-Blank Questions in Interaction: Incomplete Utterances as a Resource for Doing Inquiries

This article reports on the use of syntactically incomplete utterances in talk-in-interaction as a resource for doing two sorts of inquiries: seeking information and initiating repair. The element inquired about is made relevant next, and typically given by the addressee, in the form of a completion fitted to the incomplete utterance. Using a vernacular term, the practice could be referred to as “asking a fill-in-the-blank question,” where syntactic structure is distributed across question and answer. It is shown how transition-relevance places can be set up in the absence of syntactic completion and how fill-in-the-blank questions thereby differ from other types of collaborative productions. The particular import and usefulness of incomplete utterances is demonstrated relative to other resources. The phenomenon shows that syntactic completion and turn completion need not coincide and illustrates how questions can constrain the form of answers through projection. Data are in French with English translation.