Question-answer sequences

6-8 septembre 2017

Simona Pekarek Doehler, UniNE

Marcel Burger, MER, UniL

Herbert Clark, Stanford University, USA Mats Ekström, Univ. of Gothenburg, Sweden Joanna Thornborrow, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France Tanya Stivers, UCLA, USA

Question-answer sequences – the prototypical type of adjacency pair – are the basic building blocks of social interaction across a variety of both ordinary and institutional situations, ranging from the classroom, through doctor-patient or mother-infant interaction, to media interviews. By asking a question, people may merely seek information, but they may also get a range of other things accomplished: they may make an offer, call for an action by others, display their entitlement to ask, or challenge the knowledge of the addressee. By responding to a question, people may comply to the terms of the question or not, and they may enact various degrees of(dis)alignment and of entitlement. In this seminar, we explore how questions are designed, how they are responded to, and what they accomplish in social interaction across a range of empirical institutional and informal settings. We scrutinizing different design formats of questions involving both linguistic and embodied resources. We ask how, through these designs, speakers display their stance or epistemic entitlement, and how, thereby, they project (or constrain) certain types of responses. And we examine the details of responses to questions in order to tackle how next speakers treat different question formats, challenge questioners' entitlement to ask and/or embody their own stance. Thereby, we also address larger issues pertaining to action formation, intersubjectivity, social coordination, the nexus of social practices involved in sites of engagement, the expectations and institutional norms enacted, re)constructed and displayed through social interaction, etc. The seminar comprises 4 plenary lectures by invited speakers, a range of workshop sessions presented by doctoral students, and a final roundtable. The invited speakers discuss question-answer sequences across a variety of settings and languages, and examine both linguistic and embodied resources participants put to use in such sequences. Students present their work in two types of work-in-progress sessions: analysis sessions, in which preliminary results are discussed; data sessions, in which empirical data is submitted to close scrutiny. A final round-table is designed to critically assess the conceptual and methodological implications that ensue from the work presented during the seminar. The seminar will be of interest to any student and researcher concerned with the analysis of social interaction and interested in the fine-grained multimodal resources participants put to use to format their actions and to mutually coordinate their social encounter.

Leysin

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