Using a corpus of Chinese natural discourse, this study examined the occurrence of 'ma' questions and their responses from a quantitative perspective, as well as how 'ma' questions and their responses are expressed and coordinated with respect to the epistemic asymmetry between speakers. The analysis of the tendencies in the types of responses to 'ma' questions in real conversations by syntactic and semantic characteristics showed that 'ma' questions and their response types do not follow a grammatical pattern, but rather certain usage patterns in specific linguistic environments depending on the speaker's level of confidence in a particular piece of information, and in each context there are different types of interrogative sentences and sentence structures to choose from, and different acceptable responses. When the structure and form of the interrogative sentence indicate a strong positive or negative confidence in the speaker's propositional content, the rate of “type-conforming responses” is much higher than otherwise. This suggests that the different types of responses are not used in a grammatically determined pattern in conversation, but are selected from among the responses that the question constraints allow.

Abstract
1. 서론
2. 연구 대상 및 방법
3. ‘嗎’의문문과 이에 대한 응답 유형
4. ‘嗎’의문문과 그 응답에서 나타나는 화자들 간의 인식적 비대칭
5. 결론
참고문헌

• 이지원(Professor, Department of Oriental Language and Culture, Gachon University; 1342 Seongnamdaero, Sujeong-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea) | Lee Jee Won