Response
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Response | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Rein Ove Sikveland (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6322-5800) |
| To cite: | Sikveland, Rein Ove. (2023). Response. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [] |
A response is a social action which is understood in relation to a previous action. Unlike more specific categories of second-pair parts, which distinguish specific types of responsive actions (e.g., answers, non-answers, second assessments, news-receipts, grantings, compliance, rejection), a response is a broad category of post-first actions.
A response can be found in line 3 of the following extract from Raymond (2003), from a corpus of postnatal visits (health visitors) to monitor the health of the new mother and baby:
[HV 5A1] (Raymond 2003: 948) 01 HV: Mm.=Are your breasts alright. 02 (0.7) 03 Mom: -> They’re fine no:w I’ve stopped leaking (.) so: 04 HV: You didn’t want to breast feed,
A response takes up on the action of a post-first (or initiating) action and is ‘typed’ according to a particular first action they are understood to address (e.g., Schegloff 2007: 78-80; Thompson, et al. 2015: 46-49). For example, a response can be an answer or a non-answer, or in other ways displaying different agendas and constraints to do with for example deontic or epistemic authority, conformity and resistance (see, e.g., Stivers & Hayashi 2010). In the example above, the response (line 3) is a nonconforming response to the yes/no terms of the question (line 1): a yes would imply the absence of a problem, whereas a no would imply there currently is a problem. To avoid conforming to those terms, Mom provides a more elaborate description of the state of her breasts (“They’re fine no:w”), and accounts for that description (“I’ve stopped leaking”) (see Raymond 2003).
Unlike first actions such as questions, which are more likely to be formulated as clause-sized units, responses typically consist of units smaller than clauses, like single words, response tokens, non-lexical vocalisations or manual gestures (see, e.g., Helasvuo, et al. 2018). Manual gestures and bodily actions may also constitute responses to verbal actions, constituting social actions such as answering and repairing (e.g., Wilkinson 2013).
While any (absence of) action which follows a first action may be understood as in some way responsive to the first action, silence or passing the floor (see non-response), and the initiation of repair may be defined outside the category of response as they are not specific to a particular type of first action (Thompson, et al. 2015: 3).
Additional Related Entries:
Cited References:
Helasvuo, M. L., Endo, T., & Kärkkäinen, E. (2018). Units in responsive turns. Journal of Pragmatics, 123, 117-120.
Raymond, G. (2003). Grammar and social organization: Yes/no interrogatives and the structure of responding. American Sociological Review, 939-967.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, T., & Hayashi, M. (2010). Transformative answers: One way to resist a question’s constraints. Language in Society, 39(1), 1-25.
Thompson, S. A., Fox, B. A., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2015). Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions. Cambridge University Press.
Wilkinson, R. (2013). Gestural depiction in acquired language disorders: On the form and use of iconic gestures in aphasic talk-in-interaction. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 29(1), 68-82.
Additional References:
Clift, R. (2016). Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press.
