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Abstract “What are you / we talking about?” is a frequently used idiomatic construction in verbal interaction. This idiom, which has a conventionalised construction meaning and various pragmatic meanings, tends to function as an indicator of metapragmatic awareness, monitoring and managing previous discourse and communicative action. Based on the metapragmatic theory, this paper aims to reveal the speaker’s metapragmatic awareness in different contexts by analyzing the pragmatic functions of “What are you / we talking about?” in Corpus of Contemporary American English. It is found that speakers frequently use “What are you / we talking about?” construction to indicate their metapragmatic awareness in four dimensions of communication: text, information, the speaker and the participants. Any choice of “What are you/ we talking about?” may serve such functions as managing discourse organization, providing cognitive-interpretive framework for the audience, constructing authoritative identity, and managing interpersonal relationship. The findings can offer some insights for further construction research, and the metapragmatic interpretation of construction helps us infer and interpret speaker’s communicative intention comprehensively.
Key words: metapragmatics; “What are you/we talking about?” construction; metapragmatic awareness
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