Pragmatic Functions of Questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun Samuel Adebayo Omotunde 1 , Samuel Alaba Akinwotu 2 *, Esther Morayo Dada 3 1 Department of English and Literary Studies, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria, 2 Department of English Studies, Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Nigeria, 3 Department of Arts and Language Education, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria Corresponding Author: Samuel Alaba Akinwotu, E-mail: samuelakinwotu@gmail.com; samuel.akinwotu@aaua.edu.ng ABSTRACT Questioning is an instructional process that is not only central to verbal interaction in the classroom but also essential to negotiation of meaning in discourse. Existing studies dealing with functions of questions have only identifed few functions which questions perform in discourse probably because the scholars who worked on them have not explored varied situations and contexts which necessitate asking questions whose functions are totally diferent from the ones already identifed in the literature. Hence, the current research investigates the pragmatic functions of questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The major advantage of using this source of data is that, it, unlike previous studies which investigate data from premeditated sources, this source provides rich and varied naturally-occurring contexts for asking diferent questions which perform diferent functions. The study is driven by insight from the concept of pragmatic competence. On the whole, the research identifed nine novel pragmatic functions of questions which have not been documented in the literature. These include questions to indicate annoyance, questions to foster interpersonal relationship, questions to persuade somebody to do something, questions for showing disapproval and so on. These fndings implicate that in a bid to build on a learner’s competence in a particular language, such a learner should be introduced to the importance of contexts in determining the function which a particular question is meant to perform in any communicative encounter. INTRODUCTION Interactants in social contexts make use of diferent “discourse units or components” like words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs and other identifable discourse units (Van Djik, 1985:6) to communicate. Depending on the context, each of the above discourse units has the capacity to adequately convey the message of a writer or speaker to his/her audience. Of the discourse units, the sentence is the most basic in passing across ideas, either simple or complex. According to Kirk Patrick (2009:21), “the most important unit structure is the sentence”. In the words of Afolayan and Ogunrotimi (2017:54) “The English sentence is a very important unit of written English language. It is the basic unit of expression…”. Function-wise, the sentence has four basic types – declarative, exclamatory, imperative and interrogative. In any normal social interaction, classroom situation inclusive, all the four sentence types above manifest. However, the interrogative type of sentence, which is used to ask questions, is our focus in this study. In any meaningful interactions, questions are bound to be asked by interactants at various points and for diverse Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.12n.3.p.12 reasons. On this point, Ilie (2015:1) avers that “empirical evidence indicates that no real communication can take place without questions. Whether questions are explicit or implicit, direct or indirect, their prominent role in communi- cation can hardly be overestimated”. Supporting the above, Zhang, Spirling and Niculesin-Mizil (2017) citing Gofman (1976) write that “questions play a prominent role in social interaction”. Because asking questions is one of those ordi- nary, unconscious, efortless and automatic things we do during social interaction, everybody assumes that they know much about the forms and functions of questions. However, Kearsely (1976:355) has revealed that: Question asking is one of those mundane and everyday activities which we spend considerable time engaged in, yet have a very rudimentary technical understand- ing of. Ask people you know to tell you why they ask questions. A shrug.... They will probably respond (if they don’t think the question too absurd) by telling you that they ask questions to fnd out something they don’t know. Advances in Language and Literary Studies ISSN: 2203-4714 www.alls.aiac.org.au ARTICLE INFO Article history Received: February 16, 2021 Accepted: April 10, 2021 Published: June 30, 2021 Volume: 12 Issue: 3 Advance access: June 2021 Conficts of interest: None Funding: None Key words: Functions of Questions, Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Adichie, Pragmatic Competence, Questions to Convey Anxiety, Questions to Insult/Abuse, Questions for the purpose of Persuasion