Stivers2022a
| Stivers2022a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | BOOK |
| Key | Stivers2022a |
| Author(s) | Tanya Stivers |
| Title | The book of answers: alignment, autonomy, and affiliation in social interaction |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Answers, Questions, Response, Recipiency, Affiliation, Alignment, Possibility Space |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year | 2022 |
| Language | |
| City | New York |
| Month | |
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| DOI | |
| ISBN | 978-0-19-756389-2 |
| Organization | |
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| Type | |
| Edition | 1 |
| Series | Foundations of human interaction |
| Howpublished | |
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Abstract
When someone poses a yes-no question to another person, norms of conversation kick in, and a wide yet bounded possibility space of responses emerges. This book relies on a large database of spontaneous naturally occurring recordings of conversations in English to first examine the questions that occasion responses and then to focus on the main response types-non-answer and answer responses. This allows us to identify the dimensions that provide the response possibility space's shape and boundaries. This book shows that confirming answers are of three main types-interjections, repetitions, and transformations-each of which has subtypes. Over a series of chapters, the book discusses each answer type and examine the contexts in which speakers rely on them. When interactants rely on a given answer, we can see that they adopt a position that is best analyzed not by reference to a single most common answer form but by reference to where it sits in the larger possibility space-the same possibility space that interactants hear a given response by reference to. Using this approach, the book shows that question recipients are concerned with alignment, autonomy, and affiliation, each conceptualized as a continuum. Interactants rely on the design of their answer turns in ways that at times accept trade-offs between these three types of cooperation. This approach helps us to see how even something as mundane as simple questions and answers are resources that we use to manage our social relationships, bringing us closer or pushing us further apart, moment-by-moment–
Notes
