34.3217, Review: The Book of Answers: Stivers (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3217. Mon Oct 30 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3217, Review: The Book of Answers: Stivers (2023)

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Date: 30-Oct-2023
From: Marine Riou [marine.riou at univ-lyon2.fr]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Stivers (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3429

AUTHOR: Tanya Stivers
TITLE: The Book of Answers
SUBTITLE: Alignment, Autonomy, and Affiliation in Social Interaction
SERIES TITLE: Foundations of Human Interaction
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Marine Riou

SUMMARY

“The book of answers: alignment, autonomy, and affiliation in social
interaction” by Tanya Stivers is a study of how participants shape
their answers to polar questions (also known as “yes/no questions”) in
spontaneous spoken English. This book is a synthesis and expansion of
the author’s previous work and collaborations on answers to polar
questions (Enfield et al. 2019) and question-answer sequences more
generally (Stivers 2010, Enfield et al. 2010).

Chapter 1 (Introduction)
Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis and descriptive
statistics, the author systematically explores a large collection of
answers to polar questions. The data come from 150 spontaneous
naturally-occurring conversations in American and British English, and
the main collection comprises 1,284 confirmatory answers to polar
questions, with an additional set of 58 cases of non-answer responses
analyzed in Chapter 3. The book focuses on two main types of responses
to polar questions (e.g. “did Fred go to the party?”): confirmatory
answers (e.g. answering “yes”, “he did”, “of course”, or “he wanted
to”) and non-answer responses (e.g. responding to the same question
with “huh?” or “no idea”). Therefore, this does not include
disconfirming answers (e.g. “no”, “he didn’t”), or answers to content
questions (“who came to the party?”) and alternative questions (“did
Fred go home or to the party?”). Stivers argues that focusing on
confirmatory answers means “focusing on the preferred response path
while working to understand what sets the answer types apart in this
otherwise cooperative context” (p. 25). She identifies “four distinct
paths of alternative but non equivalent response types to questions”
(p. 3), which are: (1) non-answer; (2) interjection; (3) repetition;
and (4) transformation. An example of each is provided below, taken
from the book but simplified to fit the formatting requirements of
this review.

(1) Non-answer (example 3.4 p. 72):
CAM: are you using your beanie,
JUS: uhm I don’t know yet.

(2) Interjection (example 4.2 p. 97):
NAN: you’ll come about eight. right?
HYL: yeah,

(3) Repetition (example 7.4 p. 191):
MIK: so- you got the aggression in you uh?
JES: I do.

(4) Transformation (example 6.18 p. 168):
GER: well will the remaining three years uhm see her in pain,
SHI: .hhh she already is in a great deal of pain;

Chapter 2 summarizes the key characteristics of polar questions, then
each subsequent chapter focuses on one type of response, and explores
how fine-tuning the turn design of each response type is connected to
the management of recipients’ affiliation, alignment, and autonomy.
The main proposal of the book is to chart the different response
options available into a “Modular Response Possibility Space” listing
the different “fork[s] in the road” (p. 68) that participants may
take, and analyzing how these structural choices affect the
micro-management of social relationships turn by turn. This system
aims to replace the analysis of polar answers in terms of
type-conformity (Raymond 2003) with a more encompassing approach
connecting turn design with alignment, affiliation, and autonomy. A
strict difference is maintained throughout the book between alignment
and affiliation, which reflect two aspects of cooperation in
interaction. Alignment concerns cooperation at the structural level:
“aligning with the questioner’s project, design, and posing of the
question to this recipient at this sequential juncture” (p. 22).
Affiliation is cooperation at the affective level, representing “our
level of agreement, involvement, and closeness with another” (p. 198).
Autonomy “cover[s] the multiple dimensions of agency” (p. 23), which
in the context of answers “concerns the degree to which the
proposition in the answer is offered by the speaker rather than being
dependent on the questioner’s own proposition” (p. 23).

Chapter 2 (“The questions we answer”) provides background on polar
questions and synthesizes previous work by the author and colleagues
(Enfield et al. 2010, Stivers 2010, Stivers & Enfield 2010 inter
alia). This chapter underscores how “questioners work hard to tailor
their questions, posing questions that recipients are able to answer;
that recipients are willing to answer; that are polarized in the
direction that they will answer; that rely on morphosyntax and lexical
choices that are suited to the task; and that involve an action in a
project that the questioner has rights to perform” (p. 179). Most of
the chapter summarizes two key dimensions of questions: action and
turn design. Actions are grouped into five main categories, which are,
in decreasing relative frequency: request for information, request for
confirmation, other-initiation repair, directive, and assessment. The
section on question design briefly covers intonation, morphosyntax,
polarity, prefaces, and epistemics, and is accompanied by an extensive
reference list on the topic.

Chapter 3 (“Responding with a non-answer”)
With a non-answer response, a recipient is “neither confirming nor
disconfirming the proposition” (p. 69), which is in part why this
response type is considered disaligning. Recipients use non-answer
responses to initiate repair (with an open-class initiator such as
“huh?”, or a partial or full repeat), to provide an account of their
inability to answer (e.g. “I don’t know”) or, more rarely, their
unwillingness to answer (e.g. “I don’t wanna say what it was about” p.
74). Some non-answer responses do not provide an account at all,
instead consisting of a non-verbal response such as a smile or a
laugh. The chapter then demonstrates why and how non-answer responses
are dispreferred. Like non responses, non-answer responses are
disaligning, since they do not advance the question’s project.
Depending on context, this can have an affiliative or disaffiliative
result.

Chapter 4 (“Interjections”)
An interjection (e.g. “yes”) is the most common type of polar answer,
corresponding to 80% of confirming answers. Interjections are “usually
conventional lexical or phrasal items that stand alone as utterances
and don’t combine grammatically with other words or morphemes” and
which “provide affirmative or negative valence […] but they give away
nothing about the proposition of the question” (p. 92). Interjection
answers “accept the questioner’s agency over the question’s
proposition” and “align with the questioner by offering an answer to
the question posed” (p. 99). Among interjection answers, Stivers
differentiates four subcategories:
(1) unmarked (“yeah”, “mm hm”);
(2) upgraded (“of course”, “certainly”), a type of marked answer with
which recipients  “problematize question asking” (p. 106);
(3) downgraded (“probably”, “maybe”), a type of marked answer with
which recipients “problematize question answering” (p. 106);
(4) acquiescent (“okay”, “sure”), a type of marked answer which “carry
a semantic layer of acceptance, foregrounding that they cede autonomy
to the questioner” (p. 110).

Chapter 5 (“Repetitions”)
This type of answer “repeat[s] all or part of the question’s
proposition as the answer” (p. 122); they are the least frequent
option (8% of confirming answers). Stivers argues that repetition
answers convey less alignment and more autonomy than interjection
answers, which, depending on context, can be affiliative or
disaffiliative. Participants can use repetition answers “to assert the
question recipient’s epistemic primacy over that proposition”, “to
assert greater agency over a course of action”, or “to convey
independent agreement with the questioner’s proposition” (p. 124). The
chapter also covers the difference between partial and full
repetitions, and answers combining interjection and repetition.

Chapter 6 (“Transformations”)
With a transformation answer (12% of answers), “a question recipient
can offer what is understandable as an answer but in a way that
reflects some modification of the original question proposition” (p.
149). These modifications can target the agenda of the question, for
example tweaking its presuppositions, focus, or a metric expressed, or
they can target the terms used in the question, for example replacing
or qualifying a term. The author argues that, thanks to transformation
answers, “speakers are able to answer questions that they otherwise
would have to provide non-answer responses to; and they can confirm
questions that they might otherwise have to disconfirm” (p. 150).
Thus, Stivers makes the case that transformations display recipient
autonomy and are the least aligning answer type, but that they allow
participants to be more aligning and affiliative than they would
otherwise be if opting for another response type.

Chapter 7 (“The modular response possibility space”)
Stivers argues that “type-conformity” (Raymond 2003) is not sufficient
anymore to analyze the full array of options that participants have
when answering a polar question, and she proposes instead a “modular
response possibility space”. She identifies “three separate but
related scalar dimensions: that of alignment, autonomy, and
affiliation” (p. 181). This is reminiscent of the paradigmatic and
syntagmatic axes of structural linguistics: “how question recipients
respond to questions will always be heard relative to the full range
of possible responses. There is a possibility space that we are all
intuitively aware of; so any response will be heard both for where it
sits inside that larger response possibility space and further against
the backdrop of the question asked” (p. 82). The author enriches the
argument she made in Stivers (2019) that question-answer sequences
provide a window into social relationships and how they are
micro-managed turn by turn in interaction. She builds the convincing
case that comparing the different ways that participants provide
confirmation after polar questions provide us with an exceptional
microcosm where we can observe how participants fine-tune and
micro-manage issues of alignment, affiliation, and autonomy, and
ultimately, their social relationships, demonstrating “the power of
moments for our social relationships” (p. 198).

EVALUATION

This book synthesizes and ties together research that the author has
been conducting on question-answer sequences in English for more than
a decade, and proposes a unified conceptual proposal to analyze the
variety of confirming answers that participants give to polar
questions. Stivers walks us through her analysis step by step in very
clear language, providing explicit explanations for key concepts and
terms. Her prose is very pedagogical, yet brisk and focused enough to
engage the reader already familiar with the existing conversation
analytic literature on answers.

For each of the main points of her reasoning, Stivers sparks the
interest of the reader with one piece of the puzzle of what it is that
participants do when they choose between one option over another. For
example, Chapter 5 opens with the puzzle of why a marriage proposal
(“will you marry me?”) is typically answered with an interjection
(“yes”) while the consent question during a wedding (“will you take X
to be you lawfully wedded Y”?) is typically answered with a repetition
(“I do”). Other illuminating examples provided for the reader to
ponder before delving into the heart of the matter are taken from news
interviews, Congress hearings, or court transcripts, where politicians
or lawyers navigate questions whose answer could incriminate them, set
an agenda they disagree with, etc. Some of these examples are extreme
cases, but they offer an accessible window into the everyday practices
under study.
Overall, this approach makes Stivers’s book accessible to readers
unfamiliar with conversation analysis terminology and methods, and a
good resource to start exploring the vast conversation analytic
literature on questions and answers. Scholars already versed in the
topic will appreciate the book as well, since it can work as a
valuable handbook of current conversation analytic research on
confirming answers to polar questions in English, and offers the most
up-to-date model charting the variety and subtlety of polar answers.

One can hope that in the near future this work will be complemented by
similar research into disconfirming answers to polar questions, as
well as answers to content questions and alternative questions, as
these aspects of answering are not covered in the book and did not
attract the same level of attention in interaction research.

REFERENCES
Enfield, N.J., Stivers, Tanya, Brown, Penelope, Englert, Christina,
Harjunpää, Katariina, Hayashi, Makoto, Heinemann, Trine, Hoymann,
Gertie, Keisanen, Tiina, Rauniomaa, Mirka, Raymond, Chase Wesley,
Rossano, Federico, Yoon, Kyung-Eun, Zwitserlood, Inge, Levinson,
Stephen C. 2019. Polar answers. Journal of Linguistics 55. 277-304.

Enfield, N.J., Stivers, Tanya, Levinson, Stephen C. 2010.
Question–response sequences in conversation across ten languages: An
introduction. Journal of Pragmatics 42. 2615-2619.

Raymond, Geoffrey. 2003. Grammar and social organization: Yes/no
interrogatives and the structure of responding. American Sociological
Review 68. 939-967.

Stivers, Tanya, Enfield, N.J. 2010. A coding scheme for
question–response sequences in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 42.
2620–2626.

Stivers, Tanya. 2010. An overview of the question–response system in
American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 42. 2772-2781.

Stivers, Tanya. 2019. How We Manage Social Relationships Through
Answers to Questions: The Case of Interjections. Discourse Processes
56. 191-209.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marine Riou



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