Research Articles

Transformative answers: One way to resist a question’s constraints

TANYA STIVERS^a1 and MAKOTO HAYASHI^a2

^a1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Tanya.Stivers@mpl.nl

^a2 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2090 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, IL 61821 USA, mhayashi@illinois.edu

ABSTRACT

A number of Conversation Analytic studies have documented that question recipients have a variety of ways to push against the constraints that questions impose on them. This article explores the concept of transformative answers – answers through which question recipients retroactively adjust the question posed to them. Two main sorts of adjustments are discussed: question term transformations and question agenda transformations. It is shown that the operations through which interactants implement term transformations are different from the operations through which they implement agenda transformations. Moreover, term-transforming answers resist only the question’s design, while agenda-transforming answers effectively resist both design and agenda, thus implying that agenda-transforming answers resist more strongly than design-transforming answers. The implications of these different sorts of transformations for alignment and affiliation are then explored.

(Received November 17 2008)

(Reviewed June 24 2009)

(Accepted July 02 2009)

(Online publication August 19 2009)

Key Words:

• Conversation Analysis;
• social interaction;
• alignment;
• affiliation;
• Japanese;
• evasion