It has been long acknowledged that the grammatical forms of individual utterances work differently in different interactional contexts. Based on the transcribed audio and video recordings of naturally occurring conversations in everyday American English, this book explores the morphosyntactic and prosodic design of response actions in four types of sequential environments. It is a pioneering work, which not only describes the varied features of responses, but also renders convincing explanations on how the speakers are motivated to choose specific grammatical forms to build their responsive actions.
In chapter 1, the authors introduce the starting point and objectives of the study. The chapter outlines four sequential environments—information-seeking, informing, assessing, and requesting—and six types of responses—particle, lexical/phrasal, minimal clausal, expanded clausal, gradable clausal, and unrelated clausal. These sequential environments and response types serve as the axis of the study, predesignating the fundamental structure of the book.
The grammatical and interactional characteristics of different response types to question-word interrogatives (QWIs) are explored in chapter 2. The authors specifically discuss the contrastively different interactional manifestations of phrasal and clausal responses to two types of QWIs, namely specifying questions and telling questions. Chapter 3 examines speakers’ routine responses towards informing. The phonetic and prosodic details of responses in terms of intonation, pitch, loudness, timing, and tone are taken into consideration in the discussion because they make important contributions to the cognitive-affective features of responses in different contexts.
In chapter 4, the focus is on responses occurring in two types of assessment-related sequences. The authors discuss the issues of agreement, epistemic access, epistemic authority, and agency when analyzing the diversified forms of responses in second assessments. They also elaborate on the connection between the use of two different response types (phrasal and expanded clausal) and the recipients’ opposite understandings towards the completeness of the story/telling during interaction. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which speakers make responses to requests. The grammatical features and contextual functions of five response types attested in the authors’ data are discussed in both compliance and noncompliance circumstances.
In each chapter from chapters 2 to 5, based on the critical examination of the alternative explanations appearing in previous studies, the authors present their own accounts for their findings. In chapter 6, they summarize the patterning similarities and differences of responses across the four sequential environments. They also restate the possible accounts for their generalizations, indicating that norms for grammatical forms in responses do exist, but the norms may vary even within one sequence type.
This book is both theoretically and methodologically valuable. The authors challenge previously taken-for-granted notions in sequence studies with systematic analysis of authentic data, providing readers with an insightful and fresh understanding towards grammar in building responsive actions. They present their analysis and findings within a neat and unified framework, greatly enhancing the readability of the book. It is a significant reference work for scholars who would like to investigate further the issues related to grammar in daily communication in English and other languages as well.
