Discourse Studies http://dis.sagepub.com/ Introduction: questioning and affiliation/ disaffiliation in interaction Jakob Steensig and Paul Drew Discourse Studies 2008 10: 5 DOI: 10.1177/1461445607085581 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dis.sagepub.com/content/10/1/5 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Discourse Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://dis.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://dis.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://dis.sagepub.com/content/10/1/5.refs.html >> Version of Record - Feb 11, 2008 What is This? Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 EDITORIAL Steensig and Drew: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction 5 Introduction: questioning and affiliation/ disaffiliation in interaction JAKOB STEENSIG UNIVERSITY OF AARHUS, DENMARK PAUL DREW Discourse Studies Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com Vol 10(1): 5–15 10.1177/1461445607085581 U N I V E R S I T Y O F YO R K , U K This special issue of Discourse Studies concerns questions and questioning in a variety of settings, and in a variety of European languages. Although the methodological approach in the articles included is broadly conversation analytic, we hope that these studies will be relevant to scholars working from a broad spectrum of linguistic, socio-linguistic and interactional perspectives. Indeed, there is right away a certain parallel between the focus of this special issue, and that of Esther Goody’s edited Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction (1978b), in which politeness theory (as it came to be known) first appeared formally. By way of highlighting our aim to connect with a wide range of scholarly interests in questioning, before introducing the articles included in this special issue it will be worth outlining some of the principal research traditions associated with the study of questions and questioning. Although this outline can only be cursory, it will perhaps help to locate the articles in this issue in relation to other approaches and traditions. Most perspectives, traditions and approaches to questioning address, in one way or another, the question with which Goody opened her essay ‘Towards a Theory of Questions’ (Goody, 1978b), ‘. . . what is it that we do when we ask questions?’ This may appear to be a simple enough question – but as we know, ‘questioning’ is, like so much else, not as simple as it first appears. These, then, are some of the most significant traditions in the enquiry into the complexities of what we do when we ask questions. The first of these traditions or perspectives concerns the linguistic resources through which utterances are constructed and recognized as questioning – especially the grammar of questioning. Although they vary across different languages, there is a cluster of syntactic and grammatical resources in any language through which interrogatives are constructed; for instance, in English questions are formed through subject-verb (or operator) reversal of the declarative form (generally polar yes/no questions), sometimes with pre-positioned interrogative words such as when, who, where, etc. So-called tag questions, Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 6 Discourse Studies 10(1) post-positioned constructions such as aren’t you?, are another such resource. However, the grammatical/syntactic nucleus of interrogative constructions has necessarily been supplemented by both phonetic analysis, to account for how declarative constructions can come to have an interrogative function (through rising intonation); and pragmatic analysis, to account for how utterances can accomplish the pragmatic force of questioning without taking grammatically or intonationally interrogative forms (for a survey of syntactic, phonetic and pragmatic resources for questioning, see especially Quirk et al., 1985; see also Heritage and Roth, 1995). In addition to the complexities of the interplay between syntactic, intonational and pragmatic resources, research has also sought to account for interrogative forms that do not do questioning, that is, in which grammatical form does not determine an utterance’s function, such as so-called rhetorical questions (Schegloff, 1984, provides an analysis of an especially characteristic case). Indeed, this tradition more generally has had to broaden its scope to include investigation of how utterances can come to have the ‘performative force’ of questioning, without being constructed in any conventionally syntactic form. The second perspective worth highlighting focuses on what questioning is used to do in interaction – particularly the apparent indirectness of questioning, in contrast to the directness of declarative and imperative forms; and the putative indirectness of some questions forms, when compared with others. So for instance in ordinary interactions, self-repairs in which a speaker cuts off what was going to be a declarative form, and changes instead to ask a question, are not infrequent (a case is I rang you up I think it was last night but you were- were you out? or was it the night before perhaps). Posing this as a question is plainly rather less direct than stating (declaring) that the recipient was out last night. Then there is a large and well-known literature, especially in politeness theory, on which question forms are more or less direct than others, and which (it is claimed) are indirect (Brown and Levinson, 1978; for a critical assessment, see especially Watts, 2003). A third perspective concerns what ‘else’ questions do: it’s plain that whilst an utterance may be formed interrogatively, and indeed may ‘question’ the recipient, the utterance simultaneously does or ‘performs’ another action. ‘Question’ is therefore only a minimal characterization of an utterance, interactionally. A clue to this is that ‘questioning’ has another meaning, besides asking someone whether they are going to a meeting, asking them what the time is, etc. That meaning is something like to be sceptical, to doubt – in short, to question the truth or veracity of what someone has claimed. In this respect, when the police question a suspect, or a parent questions a teenager who arrived home late, they ‘interrogate’ the suspect or teenager. So questioning someone’s account, questioning their authority and so on point to the ways speakers can doubt, challenge or accuse through questioning. But so many other actions can be managed or performed through questioning, including suggesting (why don’t we . . .), inviting (why don’t you come over . . .), requesting (would you pass me . . .) and complaining (why don’t you ever . . .). A main theme in Goody’s (1978a) essay on questions is to explore how so many other actions are performed through the device of questioning. Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 Steensig and Drew: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction 7 A fourth theme is developmental – how do novice speakers of a language, usually children, acquire the linguistic skills to construct questions (these usually being syntactically more complex constructions than others)? There’s a considerable research literature in psycholinguistics and child language development exploring the processes and mechanisms involved in acquisition of the grammar of questions, and the determinants of the stages of this acquisition process. Finally (though there may be other perspectives and themes in questioning research, this is the last of those which are perhaps most prominent), a significant theme from a variety of perspectives on questions is their constraining force. It is widely acknowledged that there is something compelling about questions – questions require answers (which is perhaps why so many other actions are performed through interrogative constructions). Again, the coercive or ‘controlling’ force of questioning is a theme in Goody’s essay. But the perspective perhaps most closely associated with the constraining force of questions is that of Conversation Analysis, and its account of adjacency pairs, according to which there is a normative expectation that if a speaker’s turn is done, and understood, as the first part of an adjacency pair (say, a request), then the recipient should respond with the second part of that pair (a granting or rejection of the request) (e.g. Sacks, 1992). Questions are just such ‘first pair parts’; indeed they are the prototypical (perhaps the most fundamental?) initial action in an adjacency pair. There is, once more, a considerable body of research into how the constraining force of expecting/requiring an answer to a question is exploited in the organization of talk in interviews of various kinds, court hearings, talk-in-interaction in the media (e.g. radio phone-in programmes, etc.) and the like. This includes research into which questioning forms are particularly constraining or ‘oppressive’ (e.g. Heritage, 2002). These, then, are some of the most prominent traditions, perspectives and themes in the linguistic (and related) enquiries into questioning. The articles in this special issue connect quite directly with many of the themes outlined in each of these areas (with the exception of the fourth, that is, the developmental stages and processes involved in acquiring the syntactic forms for interrogatives, which is not a focus in any of the articles here). So the articles included here connect with the existing body of work on questioning, from a variety of perspectives – and develop further the analysis of what questions accomplish in interaction, and how particular types of questions contribute to creating affiliation or disaffiliation between interactants. At the heart of this lies a seemingly trivial, but crucial, fact: asking a question is not an innocent thing to do. Often questions challenge or oppose something a co-participant has said or done, thereby creating possible interactional disaffiliation. And even in cases where questions are designed to get information (or confirmation), they still seem to deal with the fact that questioning can be a problematic, or disaffiliative, activity. The interactions investigated in this special issue take place in five European languages (German, Finnish, Danish, Italian and British English) and in a wide array of different institutional settings (everyday talk between friends and relatives, meetings, therapy, televised political discussions, survey interviews, Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 8 Discourse Studies 10(1) home help, calls to an ambulance call centre, emergency calls, service encounters and police interrogations). All articles address how questioning practices are tied to different institutional demands, and some of them furthermore address the language specificity of the question formats they study. This special issue thus investigates questioning as a social practice that has real-life consequences. In line with earlier conversation analytic studies, the articles spell out the linguistic and sequential preconditions for achieving specific social effects. They, additionally, contribute new insights through describing hitherto undescribed practices, through being explicit about how these practices relate to issues of interactional affiliation and disaffiliation, through relating the described practices to institutional norms and practices, and through describing question phenomena in a number of different languages. Five of the six articles in this issue (Egbert and Vöge; Halonen and Sorjonen; Heinemann; Monzoni; and Steensig and Larsen) originate in research undertaken within a collaborative European project on ‘Language and Social Action: A Comparative Study of Affiliation and Disaffiliation across National Communities and Institutional Contexts’.1 This project focused on first (rather than responsive) actions in different types of interactions, and on the affiliative and disaffiliative potentials of these actions. Among the actions investigated were assessments (Asmuss, in press; Kjærbeck and Asmuss, 2005; Peräkylä and Ruusuvuori, 2006; Ridell, 2005; Ruusuvuori, 2005), complaints (Drew and Curl, forthcoming; Lindström and Bergeå, 2007), offers (Curl, 2006; Heinemann, 2005), requests (Asmuss, 2007; Curl and Drew, forthcoming; Heinemann, 2006; Larsen, 2006; Lindström, 2005; Lindström and Ridell, 2005), and – as witnessed by this issue – questions and questioning. The article by Stokoe and Edwards (this issue) happened to fit in very precisely with the focus of the present publication, in that it describes another hitherto undescribed questioning practice in a way that specifies its affiliation and disaffiliation potential and is explicit about institutional aspects of its use. Questions and questioning In the articles, the word question is used in the way presented above, as a term indicating an utterance which is the first pair part of a question–answer adjacency pair. It thus designates the interactional function. Questioning is used about the activity of asking questions. The term interrogative designates particular lexico-syntactic turn design features, that is, the form that a question may take. On some occasions, however, terms containing question can also be used about the form, as in ‘wh-question’ or ‘yes/no question’. Also questions made with a declarative (i.e. non-interrogative) turn design are described (in the articles by Stokoe and Edwards and by Steensig and Larsen). Many linguists have considered ‘eliciting information’ the core function of a question (e.g. Levinson, 1983; cf. the discussion in Egbert and Vöge, this issue). The analyses in this issue repeatedly show that this is not necessarily the case. Even though information (or confirmation) may be part of what a question is built Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 Steensig and Drew: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction 9 to get, this seems to be virtually never (at least in the types of question–answer pairs investigated in this issue) what questioning in interaction is centrally about. In almost all cases, the questioner knows, or has at least some prior access to, the answer to the questions. Instead, we see questions employed in order to make (further) disaffiliative moves (Halonen and Sorjonen; Heinemann; Monzoni), conciliatory actions (Halonen and Sorjonen; Monzoni), or to get information on record (Steensig and Larsen; Stokoe and Edwards). In other cases, it is difficult to decide precisely what the ‘question’ asks for. This is the case with some of the very challenging and disaffiliative question types (described in the articles by Egbert and Vöge; Halonen and Sorjonen), after which a direct response by the designed recipient is not provided. Rather, a range of activities by third parties are initiated to deal with the disaffiliative character of the ‘question’. Affiliation and disaffiliation The issue of whether or not the questioning practices contribute to interactional affiliation or disaffiliation is central to all the articles. In most of the articles, these terms are used more or less synonymously with terms like ‘(dis)alignment’, ‘(dis)agreement’ and even ‘(dis)preference’. In the analyses, ‘affiliative’ moves are actions which agree with or take the same stance as co-participants. ‘Disaffiliative questions’ typically perform actions like challenging, reproaching, complaining, criticizing, disagreeing, or the like. In a few specific cases, it has made sense to distinguish ‘(dis)affiliation’ analytically from ‘(dis)alignment’ and ‘(dis)preference’ (the article by Steensig and Larsen). This attempt has been informed by Stivers (in press), in which she makes a distinction between ‘alignment’ and ‘affiliation’ in her analysis of responses to storytelling in progress. The articles The article by Egbert and Vöge focuses on the interactional use of two German question words which both translate English why. One of these (warum) is exclusively used in utterances which are disaffiliative and complaint implicative. The other (wieso) is used to ask for information and does not seem to contribute to disaffiliation at all. An earlier study (Egbert, 2002) had already shown this division of labour for one data corpus. In the present article, the data corpus is expanded and the results from the first study are further developed. Furthermore, an explicit comparison is provided between the two unambiguous German why’s (one disaffiliative and one more ‘neutral’) on the one hand, and on the other the English ambiguous ‘why’ which, depending on sequential context, can be used in either a request for information (with no disaffiliative potential) or in a disaffiliative reproach type of utterance. The article introduces and discusses the issue of power relations by pointing to the fact that in the business meetings, which constitute the main data corpus for the analyses, warum (the disaffiliative ‘why’) is used only by superiors to people lower in the hierarchy (with one significant exception that turns out to confirm Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 10 Discourse Studies 10(1) the suggested systematicity). Finally, the authors raise doubt whether it is at all relevant to use the term ‘question word’ about warum (the disaffiliative ‘why’), given that this word is not used in question–answer adjacency pairs, but rather in more complex sequences where the issue is placing a responsibility or a blame. Heinemann’s article also describes a clearly disaffiliative use of a particular question type. Building on a database of interactions in Danish in different settings, she analyses a practice with which questioners can put the answerers in a sort of ‘Catch 22’. The speaker asks a polar (or yes/no) question which is designed to get a confirming answer, but which, in the actual sequential context, cannot be answered confirmatively without displaying disagreement with the questioner. Such ‘unanswerable questions’ function as a very strong challenge of a stance or a practice to which the answerer has committed herself. Heinemann shows how the sequences leading up to the questions prepare the ground for them and how answerers deal with the difficult situation these questions put them in. She also argues that the question design used (same polarity questions) is particularly apt for doing this kind of strong challenge, and she compares the format to other possible formats with which the same kind of challenge may be carried out. Halonen and Sorjonen examine a questioning practice which they term niininterrogatives. They are questions (both yes/no questions and wh-questions) in Finnish interactions containing the particle niin. This particle means ‘so’, ‘as’ or ‘that’ and is used in (implicit) comparisons, as in for instance, ‘Is she NYT [now/ really] NIIN [so] terrible’. The authors’ analyses show that the practice is used to suggest that the stance which a recipient has displayed is unduly exaggerated. Halonen and Sorjonen find that this practice instantiates a norm of ‘walking the golden mean’, which can also be found in other aspects of social life in the western world. Contrary to more explicit disagreements, niin-interrogatives avoid open conflict and a topicalization of the challenge as a challenge, and can consequently be seen as less strong, or better fitted sequentially, than more direct disaffiliative practices. Monzoni analyses two different practices in Italian interactions which set up a sequence in which a direct complaint can be produced after the answer to the question. The first practice involves positive polar (yes/no) questions used in calls between hospital staff and an emergency call centre. After a confirming answer to such a question, the questioner points out a problem with this situation. The second practice consists of wh-questions used in everyday conversation to clear the path for a more direct criticism. The important feature of both practices is that the complaint in third turn is an interactional achievement depending on the outcome of the question–answer sequence. The difference between them, and the rationale behind their occurrence in particular contexts, is that the first practice establishes a common ground of understandability between interactants, whereas the second type of question already can be heard as challenging and functions to make the challengeable item explicit and accountable. In this way, the first practice is more affiliative than the second. Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 Steensig and Drew: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction 11 The article by Stokoe and Edwards describes what the authors (and interactants) term ‘silly questions’. These questions are asked by British police offers in police interviews with suspects. They occur at a point towards the end of the interview where the suspects have admitted to a criminal act, and specifically after sequences in which police officers have made a formulation of the crime and the suspects have confirmed these formulations. The ‘silly questions’ ask suspects to confirm ‘for the record’ their ‘state of mind’ and ‘intention’, in terms that fit the ready-made categories of crime and ‘mental state’ useable for formulating criminal charges against the suspects. The suspects generally cooperate and confirm the formulations of the ‘silly questions’. The article describes the work done with ‘silly questions’ to make them affiliative: the police officers seemingly affiliate with an obvious counter-argument against their questions – that they are silly. They thus distance themselves from the institutional job of asking these particular questions (‘I have to ask these questions’). This seems to make it easier for suspects to answer the questions affirmatively, but the practice has potential negative real-life consequences for suspects because it makes it possible to formulate charges against them for having committed the crimes ‘with intention’. The final article, by Steensig and Larsen, analyses a specific type of questions in interactions in Danish. The questions are asked by means of the formula you say + a partial repeat or formulation of what the recipient has said. All the questions have declarative syntax, but the authors argue that they are unambiguously doing questioning. The majority of the ‘you say x questions’ come from a corpus of calls to an emergency line, and are produced by the call-taker. Most of these are follow-up questions which are designed to get the recipient to confirm something already mentioned, ‘for the record’. This practice is treated as unproblematic and affiliative by interactants. However, on a few occasions, ‘you say x questions’ are treated as challenging and disaffiliative. This is the case when they break the action trajectory, for instance when they occur in a place where a response to a request should have come. Such disaffiliative questions also have marked prosody. A third category of ‘you say x questions’ asks for accounts in a less disaffiliative way than the second type and has less marked prosody too. The article argues that the central factor determining the (dis)affiliation potential of the examined type of questions is the sequential trajectory. The activity of gathering information and getting it on record is essential in the calls to the emergency line, which explains the prevalence of this type of questions in this data corpus. However, the prosody of the questions and the degree to which the item inquired about is potentially problematic, also contribute to determining the (dis)affiliative potential of the questions. What determines the disaffiliation potential of a questioning practice? The analyses in the present issue give us a basis for discussing what makes a question disaffiliative. Here, we will briefly discuss the following factors: Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 12 Discourse Studies 10(1) sequential environment, preface and accounts, lexical items, prosody, epistemic access and syntactic format. There are environments which are ripe with disaffiliation potential. In the articles by Egbert and Vöge, Heinemann, and Monzoni, these are situations in which it has been established that an interactant has done or said something which the questioner considers wrong, or not done something which she should have done. It can also be a normatively dispreferred exaggeration (Halonen and Sorjonen) or a request which the questioner does not find warranted (Steensig and Larsen). The fact that the questioner knows or suspects the answer to the question, and that this is evident to interactants (and analysts), also seems to contribute to the disaffiliation potential. However, looking at the real-life social problem of dealing with interactional affiliation and disaffiliation, we can see that the task facing interactants is more complex than just locating the contexts that have disaffiliation potential. Even when there is no disaffiliation in the air, questioners need to design their questions in ways that warrant their occurrence. This is done with prefaces and accounts, the most clear example being the police officers who term their questions as ‘silly’ before asking them (Stokoe and Edwards). The only environment described in the articles in which affiliative questions are asked without prefaces or accounts, is when questions are asked ‘for the record’ (Steensig and Larsen; Stokoe and Edwards). It would thus seem that the postulate made above, that asking a question is not an innocent thing to do, might be taken one step further: it takes special work to produce an affiliative question. Specific lexical items are used to mark questions as disaffiliative. This is the case with the German warum (‘why’), which, according to Egbert and Vöge, is unambiguously disaffiliative. The Finnish particle niin (‘so’, ‘as’, ‘that’) used in questions about evaluative judgements (Halonen and Sorjonen) also clearly marks questions as disaffiliative and challenging. According to Stokoe and Edwards, and Steensig and Larsen, prosody can contribute to marking questions as affiliative or disaffiliative. A tentative conclusion based on their analyses might be that prosodic features can – but do not necessarily – indicate the (dis)affiliation potential of questions. The relationship between syntactic format on one hand and disaffiliation potential on the other is not straightforward. Some of the articles emphasize the conduciveness and ‘no way out’ character of polar questions (yes/no interrogatives) and consider these more disaffiliative than corresponding whquestions. Heinemann, for instance, finds that the yes/no questions are more disaffiliative because the response options (‘yes’ or ‘no’) are blocked by the preceding context, whereas wh-questions could still get treated as just asking for information and thus the challenge could be deferred. In Monzoni’s study, however, the wh-questions are more disaffiliative than the polar questions. One reason for this is that the – disaffiliation implicative – answer to the wh-question is obvious from the context, whereas there is a real information gap in the case of the polar questions investigated. The conclusion must be that the syntactic format does not in itself determine the disaffiliation potential of the question. The above mentioned factors must be taken into account when considering the interactional impact of syntax. Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014 Steensig and Drew: Questioning and affiliation/disaffiliation in interaction 13 Conclusion Some researchers have operated with a distinction between ‘real’ questions, which are information or confirmation seeking, on one hand, and objects like ‘rhetorical’ questions, which challenge or confront the recipient, on the other. This collection of articles investigates questioning practices of the more ‘rhetorical’ or confrontative type (and the limits between the two). One preliminary conclusion from these studies is that the above distinction is not warranted. Rather, aspects of social disaffiliation are always a central issue to interactants when they produce or respond to questions. It takes work to produce an affiliative, information seeking, question. This work, and also the work involved in making specific types of disaffiliative questions, is documented in this issue. Furthermore, the studies are explicit about the institutional bases and the linguistic resources of the questioning practices. In this way, we hope that this special issue may have a stimulating effect on research into questioning practices and issues of social affiliation and disaffiliation in different contexts and languages. N OTE A note on transcriptions: All authors in this issue employ Gail Jefferson’s standard conversation analytic transcription conventions. Guides to these conventions can be found in all books on Conversation Analysis, such as Atkinson and Heritage (1984); Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998); Jefferson (2004); Schegloff (2007); Ten Have (1999); and on webpages such as Paul ten Have’s EMCA site (www.paultenhave.nl/resource), or Charles Antaki’s CA tutorial (www.staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1). When authors have employed additional symbols, in their glossing lines or elsewhere, such symbols are explained in notes or in appendices in each article. 1. The project was supported by the European Science Foundation’s social science framework and national research councils (see further acknowledgements in the individual articles) and ran from 2003 to 2006. More information can be obtained at: www.uta.fi/laitokset/sosio/project/affiliation REFERENCES Asmuss, B. (2007) ‘What Do People Expect from Public Services? Requests in Public Service Encounters’, Hermes 38: 65–83. Asmuss, B. (in press) ‘Performance Appraisals: Preference Organization in Assessment Sequences’, Journal of Business Communication. Atkinson, J.M. and Heritage, J. (eds) (1984) Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P. and Levinson, S. (1978) ‘Universals in Language Use’, in E. Goody (ed.) 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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His PhD was about Interactional Linguistics. He has further published on turn construction in Danish and Turkish, on bilingual interaction, and on the interactional functions of specific syntactic and lexical constructions in Danish. Jakob Steensig was the Danish coordinator of the European project on ‘Language and Social Action’, from which many of the articles in the present issue originated. Presently, his research focus is on how interactional practices reflect and constitute social norms, involving issues of interactional affiliation/disaffiliation and the distribution and rights to knowledge. JAKOB STEENSIG PA U L D R E W is Professor of Sociology at the University of York, UK, where he has taught and researched in Conversation Analysis since 1973. He has published journal and other articles on the basic practices underlying talk-in-interaction, as well as a range of aspects of conversational interaction, including: repair; the management of such actions as invitations, requests and complaining; topic transition; and teasing. He has also published widely on what have come to be termed ‘institutional’ interactions, notably criminal court and medical (doctor–patient) interactions. His recent projects include communication between patients and medical professionals in a variety of primary and secondary care clinical settings; affiliation and disaffiliation in conversation; and indirectness in talk. Downloaded from dis.sagepub.com at Loughborough University on September 26, 2014