Stivers develops a model of a question-response system of interaction with a focus on data from American English interactions and connects these detailed interactions to the social relationships interactants create with their question-response sequences. She works in the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) and provides detailed and compelling qualitative analyses of interactions of different response types within what she calls the response possibility space. This follows a long line of CA tradition going back to early work on adjacency pairs but expands and enriches that work considerably.
Stivers sets the stage in the introduction with a wide review of literature on questions and responses, her relationship dimensions of alignment, affiliation, and (respondent) autonomy, and a short overview of her data. The latter could have been more fulsome, as it is still unclear exactly who the speakers are and how the data was gathered. Although for the purposes of the system she describes this description is adequate and within the CA tradition, it would have benefited from more explication.
Chapter 2 then provides an overview of polar questions, the question type which is her focus, and presents a categorization of different dimensions of question design. These categories are used in later chapters to find patterns of response to types of design. Stivers then outlines a taxonomy of response types in chapter 3, including answer vs. non-answer responses, with a focus on the latter.
The middle three chapters outline the patterns of three types of answers: interjections, repetitions, and transformations. Interjections are yes/no-type answers, and Stivers develops a typology of these answers and their relationship implications, along with frequencies of use in the corpus. Repetitional answers, which repeat part of the question in the answer, receive a similar treatment in chapter 5. In chapter 6, transformational answers, responses in which ‘recipients put forward a different proposition than the one in the question’ (147), become the focus. Here the developed taxonomy becomes more complex and differently connected to the relationship dimensions. What emerges is a well-motivated and useful taxonomy of polar-question answer types.
In the final chapter, Stivers maps these different response types onto the three interactional dimensions of alignment, autonomy, and affiliation, showing how question-response sequences are used by interactants to create and manage complex social relationships far beyond what is often assumed to be a simple exchange of information. For example, she shows how ‘upgraded interjections’ (‘Sure!’) indicate relatively high alignment, low autonomy, and high affiliation, while ‘presupposition transformations’ (which reformulate or negate a presupposition in the question) create low alignment, high autonomy, and relatively low affiliation.
Stivers thus moves from details, to typologies, to a system of social answering which she calls the ‘modular response possibility space’ (179). This book thus provides a valuable and productive system for researchers in interaction analysis to connect the most basic interaction exchange with social and interactional relationships, a system that should be in the toolbox of every analyst.
