CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Geoff Raymond (Sociology, University of York), February 16, 2001.

"The Structure of Responding: Type-conforming and Nonconforming Responses to Yes/No Type Interrogatives."

Scholars in the social sciences have been more willing to acknowledge the centrality of language in the production and maintenance of social life than to actually pursue how its use and organization features in it. The peripheral status accorded language is a product of how social scientists have so far understood it. Sociologists, for example, have typically viewed language either for how it reflects and reproduces systems of distinction, such as race class and gender, but lacking any autonomous force of its own, or as a wholly autonomous structure with properties strictly internal to it, but lacking any connection to the circumstances of its use. Missing from most such work is any appreciation of language use as a normatively organized format for social action deployed in the management of self-other relations. In this talk I attempt to ground this possibility by examining one of the most pervasive and widely recognized forms deployed in talk-in-interaction: yes/no type interrogatives and the turns speakers build in response to them.

Initially I will show that, fundamentally, yes/no type interrogatives constitute an instance of grammaticalized normativity. That is, the grammatical structure of a yes/no type interrogative makes a particular response form relevant next, and makes responses that depart from that form noticeable and eventful. To demonstrate this I describe the alternative response types recipients of this turn format can produce - what I call type conforming responses and nonconforming responses -- and the outcomes achieved by the selection of one or the other. In part these outcomes can be understood only by reference to the preference such interrogatives project for the responses they make relevant.

The main focus of the talk will be concerned with demonstrating that the grammatical structure of these interrogatives projects a fine grained interpretive matrix against which interactants build and assess responsive actions. To illustrate this I focus on the dense array of activities accomplished within type-conforming responses through variations in (i) the design of the turns they are embedded in, (ii) the tokens used to implement them (yes, yeah mhhmm, yep, etc.), and (iii) the prosodic contours through which those tokens are realized. These observations allow us to see how the manipulation of words, grammar and prosody --that is to say language -- features in the management of self-other relations. By describing a grammaticalized normative structure I show how yes/no type interrogatives provide speaker and analyst alike detailed tools for parsing turns that allow each of us to realize the activities, harmonious and discordant, emotional and dispassionate, compliant and subversive, out of which the richness of daily life is built.