Responding indirectly

Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Responding indirectly Traci Walker *, Paul Drew, John Local Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 20 May 2010 Received in revised form 11 February 2011 Accepted 20 February 2011 Available online 5 April 2011

In this research, we analyse the sequential environments in which indirectness is used in everyday conversations. This is a distinct break with traditional research into indirectness, which often focuses on the psychological conditions for felicitously doing and/or comprehending an indirect speech act. This innovative approach allows us to show what interactional pressures there are to respond indirectly – in effect, why speakers sometimes respond indirectly. One of the interactional pressures we note is that utterances consisting only of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ are often not treated as adequate responses, even to syntactically polar questions. Upon receiving such responses, participants regularly pursue further information. So, rather than produce responses that are only superficially matched to the syntactic structure of the prior inquiry, speakers can and do produce responses that display their analysis of the activity being pursued in that inquiry – so-called indirect responses. We show that by responding indirectly, one participant can uncover the prior turn’s agenda, or can display that a previous inquiry is inapposite in some way. Such explanations for why indirect responses are produced can come only from the analysis of naturally occurring conversations. For certain activities, in specific sequential locations, responding indirectly may be the most efficient form of communication. ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Indirectness Responding Conversation analysis Sequence organization

1. Introduction This research presents an analysis of the sequential environments in which interlocutors respond indirectly to inquiries put to them. The fragments below are representative examples of our collection of indirect responses; the turn of interest is highlighted in grey.

1 IND 64 HV 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Mot: HV: Mot: HV: Mot: HV:

I've taken maternity leave. ([ ) [I'm due to go back in Ma:rch and who will look after (.) ((baby's name)). I was goin' back on nights. I see.

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Walker). 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.02.012

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2435

2 IND 2 Field 1. Dan: Becuz (0.3) I'm g'nna go see nice Mister Chemist 'n ask 2. im what 'ee c'n do about my eye. Becuz it itches a lot. 3. ...7 lines omitted 4. Gor: =hmhhhh Could it be pollen. 5. (0.8) 6. Dan: Par don? 7. Gor: Pollen:. 8. (0.3) 9. Gor: .k As in: uh hay fever. 10. (0.2) 11. Dan: It's in one eye:.

We categorise these two responses, ‘‘I was going back on nights’’ and ‘‘it’s in one eye’’, as indirect because of the relationship they display to the preceding inquiries. In the first case, HV (a health visitor; in the UK, a nurse or midwife who visits a baby and mother at home in the first days after a baby’s birth) has been asking a new mother about her work arrangements, culminating in a wh-question (line 4) asking who will care for the baby when the mother returns to work. Because the linguistic format of the response to this question does not provide a referent for the ‘‘who’’, it is, for our purposes, indirect. In the second case, Dana’s turn ‘‘it’s in one eye’’, is produced in response to a polar question posed by Gordon: ‘‘could it be pollen’’, line 4. This response does not contain a yes or no, as would be expected after a polar question (see Quirk et al., 1985 for a traditional grammar approach, or Raymond, 2003 on type-conforming questions). Instead, it requires the recipient to deduce a answer to the question, based on the information given in the response. Formal interest in the use of indirectness in language can be traced to the late 1960s and the rise of speech act theory (Searle, 1969). From its inception, speech act theory was concerned with the ways in which language is used to do activities – how ‘‘I promise’’ performs the act of promising, ‘‘I wish’’ makes a wish, and so on. In addition to the actions for which performative verbs exist, speech act theory recognised that language was also the instrument by which other, more mundane, actions were carried out – for instance, making (as well as responding to) requests. Searle (1969:48) maintained that sentence meaning is determined by rules, but simultaneously realised that sentences can perform acts which are not determined by those same rules. Speech act theory was developed to address the question of how to bridge the gap between abstract sentence meaning and the speech act performed by it. One way is by positing the existence of indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts can be understood by appeal to the mismatch between the literal meaning of an utterance and its illocutionary force (i.e., the act it is performing). Thus we find that the object of interest for speech act theory is not in fact the actions accomplished through speech, but the process of inferencing from the literal meaning of the sentence to its primary illocutionary point (by means of necessary and sufficient conditions, etc.). The literal meaning of sentences is afforded prime of place, as Searle (1975:70) rejects as ‘‘obviously false’’ the idea that a sentence can have a different meaning depending on context. Thus, even indirect speech acts are understood by knowing the literal meaning of a sentence. Several psycholinguistic studies of indirectness address this division between putative types of meaning – literal meaning and meaning in context, which Gibbs (1999) describes as the Standard Pragmatic View. A good deal of psycholinguistic evidence suggests that we ought to reject the Standard Pragmatic View in favour of ‘direct access’ to figurative or indirect meanings (Gibbs, 1979, 1999; Holtgraves, 1999). In his overview of the research literature, Gibbs (2002) shows that although speakers can (i.e. sometimes might) use the distinction between literal and indirect meanings (his ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’), there is no evidence to support the claim that literal meaning is always computed first. If literal meaning is not primary, then ‘literal’ is nothing more than a label for a meaning which, like any other, is derived from a particular environment. Since literal meaning is congruent with directness, its deposing means that indirect speech is not deviant, is not something less than an ideal, direct way of interacting, but simply another way of making meaning in an interaction. The focus of the work presented here is neither a critique of the treatment of indirectness in speech act theory, nor of psycholinguistic investigations of the understanding of indirect speech. We mention these two strands of work because of the pervasive influence that they have had on the study of indirectness. Whereas speech act theory concentrates on investigating the form of (in)directness, rather than its function, and psycholinguistics investigates the use of inferencing rules and their role in how, psychologically speaking, people come to understand non-literal or indirect uses of language, in our work we focus instead on the function of indirectness in responsive actions – where are indirect responses employed, and what actions do they themselves constitute? Although a good deal of recent psycholinguistic work supports a more context-driven, interactive, multipartite construction of meaning, we find that the majority of this work relies on the conduit metaphor of language, and investigates only the role of comprehension, rather than production.1 Rather than cling to the idea that language delivers meaning,2 in this paper we provide an analysis of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction that

1 Politeness theory is a line of enquiry which has focussed on the production and/or use of indirect speech acts. We, however, agree with Watts’s (2003) critique of politeness theory as it is most commonly practiced. 2 An idea that can be traced to the philosopher Frege, writing in the 19th century.

2436

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

starts from the premise that language is in fact used to deliver actions. Although we continue to use the terms direct and indirect, we hope to re-examine and extend these terms, and to disassociate them from literal and non-literal. This report is a study of indirect responses to questions conducted using the methods of Conversation Analysis (for an overview of this methodology see Drew, 2005). Our focus is what speakers are doing when they respond indirectly. To answer this question, we have collected a set of naturally occurring instances of indirect responses to enquiries, and examined the sequential location and linguistic format of the responses. Unlike a good deal of conversation analytic work which takes as its starting point a particular action or activity and explicates how that action is performed, we are not here claiming that ‘being indirect’ is an action in the same way that requests or offers of assistance are identifiable actions. Our interest in analyzing indirect responses arose from the longstanding use of the term in linguistics as well as the fact that ‘indirectness’ is a well-known folk category. Our research is aimed at discovering what if anything instances of indirect response have in common, by investigating what they are being used to do. First, we must explicate how we built our collection of indirect responses. Therefore, in the following section we analyse other, more (and less) direct responses to polar questions, in order to arrive at an ostensive definition of indirectness. Sections 3 and 4 discuss two interactional issues that speakers manage by responding indirectly, and section 5 summarizes and discusses our findings. 2. Direct, ‘direct’ and indirect As mentioned in section 1, this study looks at the use of indirect responses to inquiry, mainly (though not exclusively) in responses to polar questions. According to a strict, Searlean approach to speech acts and (in)directness, a direct response to any polar question requires a yes or no; similarly, Raymond (2003:946) defines type-conformity as adhering to the (grammatical) constraints set up by a prior turn. By this definition, fragment 2 presented in section 1 would be classed as non-type conforming; that is, the response given to a polar question (‘‘could it be pollen’’, line 4) does not contain either a yes or a no token. It has been shown, however, that participants in an interaction do not always treat a yes/no response as an adequate answer to a polar question (Heritage and Raymond, in press). The data fragments below provide examples of how, in certain sequences, participants can find both negative and affirmative answers insufficient. In the first fragment, a health visitor, or visiting nurse, is meeting a new mother and father and their baby for the first time. The interaction takes place in their home, when the baby is a few weeks old. 3 HV 4A1 p1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

HV: Fat: Fat: Mot: HV: Fat: HV: Mot: Fat: HV: Fat: HV:

Lovely.=a little bo:y.=what are you ca[:lling him. ((spread lips)) [yes Michael. Michael. Mi:chael ye[h [that's a nice name[:.>is that your name?< [mm no (0.6) no?= =Michael Thomas. (.) is my- (.) my name Thomas. Oh ri:ght

Lines 7–12 provide an example of ‘‘no’’ being treated as an insufficient response, even though it fits the definition of ‘typeconforming’ (Raymond, 2003). By responding with ‘‘no’’ in this instance, the father treats the inquiry as only about the origin of the baby’s name, and hearably withholds his own name. His ‘‘no’’ response treats the proposition in question, i.e., ‘your name is (also) Michael’, as requiring no action other than agreement or disagreement. The HV’s question clearly displays, however, that she does not know the father’s name, and thus the inquiry is designed as an elegant solution to the interactional problem of asking for his name (cf. Schegloff, 1979). By pursuing a more elaborated response, the health visitor indicates that in this sequence, a simple negative reply is insufficient, because it does not treat her question as initiating, or continuing, the exchange of information. It is not only negative type-conforming responses that can be treated as inadequate. In the following fragment, a couple (Alice and Bernard) are discussing where Bernard will live when he returns from a year teaching in Japan. He is still in Japan when this conversation takes place, but his return to the US is imminent. 4 CHAm4432 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ali: Ber:

so have you written to Joe (0.3) John (.) John (0.3) yeah (0.4)

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ali: Ber: Ali: Ber: Ali: Ali: Ali: Ber:

2437

and couple times (0.3) yeah he:::: [didn’t re]spond to my latest one [what’s he] oh (.) well (0.3) okay (0.4) he: en that was like (.) three four days ago

Here, the type-conforming response ‘‘yes’’ is formatted as if it were dispreferred – it is produced after a 0.3 gap of silence (Heritage, 1984a). Furthermore, it does no more than affirm the fact that he has indeed ‘‘written to . . . John.’’ Although this is a lexicosemantically positive response, ‘‘yes’’ on its own fails to, or by design declines to, demonstrate to Alice any willingness to engage in an expanded response. In effect, ‘‘yes’’ is in this instance, an almost totally uninformative response. Alice treats it as such by pursuing an elaboration with a conjunction, ‘‘and’’ (line 5), which invites Bernard to provide the substantial information her initial question sought. In these examples, the additional information being sought is made explicit in the subsequent talk. The health visitor’s repetition of ‘‘no?’’ leads to the father providing his own name; Alice’s pursuit of whether or not Bernard’s supposed accommodation is still available takes much longer, and ends with him admitting he is still not sure (data not shown). The polar question producers demonstrate, by their pursuit of the information, that they expected their enquiries to engender responses that were more elaborate than a simple yes or no, however direct (in a speech act sense) such responses may be.3 In other words, it seems that they were counting on their co-participants’ ability to respond to ‘why that now’ rather than the response explicitly provided for by the prior turn’s syntactic structure. This suggests that there can be an organizational pressure on interlocutors to ‘do more’ than respond (only) to the grammatical form of (polar) questions. 2.1. ‘Direct’ responses One way in which speakers can do more is to provide not a yes or no token, but a ‘direct’, clear and obvious, response. What we mean by clear and obvious is shown by the responses highlighted in the following examples, which are non-type conforming (in Raymond, 2003’s terms), but are, we claim, ‘direct’ (though modulated or qualified) responses to the preceding inquiries. 5 Heritage I.6 1. 2. 3. 4.

MrsH: Edg:

O:keh-eh Oh he i:s coming back t'[morrow i[s he? ['t! [He'll be back again tomorrow I would think ahout mid da:y so if you: you could pho:ne throu:gh,

6 NB 13 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Emm:

.hhhh is there any place around here that u-has those Lottie do yih know [I know

In fragment 5, the response ‘‘he’ll be back again tomorrow’’ addresses the question by recycling lexical material from it, and giving the confirmation that Mrs H’s question seeks. Understanding it as an affirmative response requires no inferencing; all that prevents it from being a direct (in Searlean terminology) or type-conforming response is a positive polarity lexical item. In fragment 6, Lottie’s response ‘‘Akrun’s I think’s the only place that I know’’ responds to the activity Emma has enacted in the prior turn – that of enlisting Lottie’s help in thinking of, or remembering, a ‘‘place around here that has those’’. Although syntactically the question is polar – that is, it is built for a yes or no answer – we saw above how some yes/no responses can be treated as, and are possibly designed to be, inadequate, as they do not display that the speaker has any understanding of the activity being undertaken or continued by the turn employing the polar question. On the contrary this response, as well as the one in fragment 5, is a clear display that the question recipient understands and is responding to the

3 Note that we are not claiming that speech act theory would claim that these sentences fulfil the necessary and sufficient conditions to perform adequate responsive speech acts; we are not concerned with proving or disproving the merits of a speech act analysis. Rather we simply wish to point out how, in naturally occurring interactions, CA methodology shows how the production of (nominally) ‘direct’ responses may not be interactionally adequate.

2438

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

activity being furthered by the question. Therefore, we propose that examples such as these ought not be classified as indirect responses – even though they lack affirmative lexical items. Stivers and Hayashi (2010) analyse the ways in which responses can transform the terms of the questions they answer. The phenomena they examine comprise more types of responses than our collection of indirect responses, though at least one of their findings, the ‘‘specification’’ function of transformative answers, is related enough to bear mention here. The following examples reprinted from their work support their claim that some transformative responses are designed to provide additional, qualifying (specifying) information that limits the extent to which the speakers are willing to affirm the terms of the inquiries. The provision of this additional information, we would argue, makes these responses more (rather than less) ‘direct’, despite the fact that they lack a yes/no. 7 SB1 55:35 (edited) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Uria: was it an open party, or was it (an ex-) I never understood that. (0.4) Vicki: we:ll:, yea:h. Uria: was it like an excha:nge?= Vicki: =it- I think it was supposed to be:,

8 SB1 39.35 1. 2. 3. 4.

Kri: Tar: Kri: Tar:

(you did it) on the pho:ne? what? you cried to him on the pho:ne? not on purpose;

The responses in both these examples directly address the object of the prior turn’s inquiry; in fragment 7, whether the party was an exchange or not; and in fragment 8, whether or not Tar cried on the phone. They are, additionally, syntactically parasitic upon them. In fragment 7, Vicki asserts her lack of certainty about the particular aspect of the party about which she is being questioned (whether it was an exchange, a type of invitation-only party held by fraternity houses) with ‘‘I think’’ and ‘‘supposed to be’’. These devices mark her response as epistemically uncertain, and display that she is providing an answer to the question to the best of her ability. Thus it is her lack of epistemic authority that is displayed in the response, not indirectness (for accounts of the role of epistemics in conversation, see Heritage and Raymond, in press; Stivers et al., 2011). In fragment 8, Tar’s response directly addresses ‘‘cried to’’ in the inquiry, asserting that she did cry but qualifying her action as not done purposefully. Again, this kind of qualification, which is additional to the confirmation (or disconfirmation) of the inquired-about action, does not make a response indirect. In both examples, there are elided grammatical elements that link each response to the preceding question: in 7, ‘‘an exchange’’; and in 8, ‘‘[I] cried to him’’. What the preceding fragments, as well as those discussed in the next section show, is that there is a coherent group of ‘direct’ responses, which while not technically direct, are clearly distinct from the intended object of our investigation. These provide a contrastive set of actions, guiding us closer to an ostensive definition of indirectness. We turn now to an explication of the formal qualities of what we will henceforth call direct responses, dispensing with the scare quotes. 2.1.1. The formal properties of direct responses In order to produce a turn at talk which can be understood as responsive to the immediately prior turn, speakers can build sequential links by utilizing certain linguistic design features, principally, ellipsis, repetition, and pronominalization. Repetition needs no explication. Ellipsis is the omission of a previously produced syntactic unit such a verb phrase; for instance, ‘‘I do’’ as uttered in a marriage ceremony is an elided version of ‘‘I do [take this man/woman to be my lawful wedded husband/wife]’’. Pronominalization may be anaphoric, e.g. a change of a proper noun to a pronoun (‘Nancy’ to ‘she’); or deictic, e.g. the replacement of an entire utterance with ‘that’ or ‘this’ (e.g. ‘are you going to the US for Christmas?’ ‘That is the plan’, with ‘that’ standing for ‘going to the US for Christmas’. By using one (or more) of these linguistic devices, co-participants display that, and how, their current turn relates to the prior talk, and thus display how the current turn can be understood as a continuation (or curtailment) of the activity or project that is underway. Fragments 10–12 exemplify the use of these devices in direct (but not yes–no prefaced) responses to enquiry. 9 SBL:2:1:6:R 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Tes: Bea: Tes: Bea: Bea:

Dih you need any ca:rds I have (0.2) I have a coupla de:cks thet'v never b'n o:pened. So hev I:, I gotta[couple'v[noo]w'ns, ] [ hhh [^Aw]_right]ho[_ney. [Ah ha:h, B't thanks a lo:t,hhh

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2439

10 SBL:3:5:R 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Gin: Mil: Mil: Gin: Mil:

Dju want me tuh stop by:? hh We:ll you ^better no:t may:be: uhm buhcuz I- I sorta dou:bt ah: think Jan has ulotta wo:rk= =[Ohh =[en I'm sert'v uh t hhh MAYBE ah'll cah:ll you if I decide I c'n go[: would that be] be[tter?] [Swel ]l. [^ O k a : y]

Gin:

The response in fragment 10 uses both repetition (of ‘‘have I’’, ‘‘couple’’) and pronominalization (‘‘decks’’ to ‘‘ones’’) to link the response turn to the just-prior enquiry (an enquiry which, we note, performs the activity of offering). In fragment 11, the response is linked to the enquiry through ellipsis of the verb phrase ‘‘stop by’’ (i.e., Millie’s turn in line 9 is comprehensible and grammatical by virtue of being understood as ‘well you better not [stop by]’, where the [stop by] is not actually produced. 11 CBS 60 Minutes: 17 December 1995 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

INT:

If I were (.) a citizen out here (0.2) and I heard your answer .hh I'd sa:y (0.2) to myself (0.2) we are spending more money (0.4) than has ever been spent on a subway (0.2) in the history (0.2) of subway construction (0.4) .hh and this guy is telling me he's learning on the job (.) we've made mistakes, we are learning (0.2) [I mean- should not they expect [where wethat (.) when you pa:y that much money that- that we shouldn't be having all these mistakes? I agree: that (.) we should not be having those mistakes (0.4) absolutely agree (0.2) I wish these things did not happen to us (0.4) but we have to to (0.2) get better (.) and move o:n

IVE: INT: IVE:

Fragment 11 shows a response to the action being done in the prior, negative interrogative turn, ‘‘should not they expect that when you pay that much money that that we shouldn’t be having all these mistakes’’. This turn performs the action of asserting a fact, rather than actually questioning the interviewee (Drew and Atkinson, 1979; Heritage, 2002). The interviewee’s turn-initial ‘‘I agree’’ (line 10) overtly responds to the assertion made in the prior turn; additionally, the response uses repetition (of ‘‘we should not be having all those mistakes’’) to link the enquiry and response. The responses shown in fragments 9–11 illustrate the ways in which speakers regularly use linguistic means to link turns at talk together, rather than relying on sequential location alone. Furthermore, these fragments demonstrate that the means of tying one turn to another are available regardless of the activity begin pursued in the interrogatively framed turn. By using these linguistic means to display the sequential connections between turns, speakers respond directly – or more properly, display that they are responding directly – to the prior speaker. However, these means are not exploited when speakers respond indirectly. 2.2. Indirect responses We now turn to some short fragments which exemplify our collection of indirect responses to inquiry. We can best describe what an indirect response is by comparison to the cases of direct responses, thus arriving at an ostensive definition of indirectness. The characteristics of indirect responses described in what follows is the outcome of our analysis of the collection, rather than being an a priori definition. The indirect responses below, highlighted in grey, are non-type-conforming, i.e., they are not yes/no prefaced when produced as responses to polar questions. Additionally, they do not regularly use ellipsis, repetition, or pronominalization to tie back to the preceding turn, and they require some sort of inferencing to be understood as responses to the prior turn. 12 IND 6 NB 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Nan:

I [just uh,h forward iz mai:l stick it in th'envelope'n

(0.4) send it all on up to im en .hhh[hhh [Yih know wher'e is the:n, (0.8) Nan: I have never had any of it retu:rned Emma,h Emm: Oh::. Nan: Emm:

2440

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

13 IND 64 HV (reproduction of fragment 1) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Mot: HV: Mot: HV: Mot: HV:

I've taken maternity leave. ([ ) [I'm due to go back in Ma:rch and who will look after (.) ((baby's name)). I was goin' back on nights. I see.

14 IND 5 Field 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Fre: Ski: Fre: Ski: Fre: Ski: Fre: Ski:

H'llo ((--break--)) ( ) speaking,] [.h h h h h h h]h h h hOh Fre:d, (0.3) Ye[ :s. [.hh Oh it's Ski:p..h Yes Ski[p. [.h Did you go back to wo:rk,h (0.2) I've got a me:ssage to ring Raymond Smi[th. [Oh: yes:.

15 IND 1 Trip to Syracuse 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Ile: ( ): Cha: Ile: Cha: Ile:

.hhh So yih not g'nna go up this weeke (hhh)/(0.2) Nu::h I don't think so. How about the following weekend. (0.8) .hh Dat's the vacation isn'it? .hhhhh Oh:. .hh ALright so:- no ha:ssle,

16 IND 2 Field (reproduction of fragment 2) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Dan: Becuz (0.3) I'm g'nna go see nice Mister Chemist 'n ask im what 'ee c'n do about my eye. Becuz it itches a lot. ...7 lines omitted Gor: =hmhhhh Could it be pollen. (0.8) Dan: Par don? Gor: Pollen:. (0.3) Gor: .k As in: uh hay fever. (0.2) Dan: It's in one eye:.

It is immediately apparent that one major difference between these responses and those in examples 10–16 is a lack of the linguistic design features that are recurrently used to link one turn to another, e.g. ellipsis, repetition, and pronominalization. The highlighted turns are interpretable as responses to the preceding inquiry, not only because of their sequential location, but also because of the way in which the talk contained in the turns instructs the co-participants to draw inferences based either on prior talk, their shared knowledge, or both. In fragment 12, the response to ‘‘you know where he is then’’ does not use ellipsis, nor repetition, nor pronominalization of any item in the just-prior turn. The pronoun ‘‘it’’ in line 7 ‘pops back over’ the prior inquiry (Fox, 1987) to ‘‘mail’’, from line 1 (also pronominalized in line 4). So this turn, ‘‘I have never had any of it returned Emma’’, is comprehensible as a response to the inquiry not only by virtue of its sequential placement, but because the recipient is directed to make a connection with the adjacent contiguous turn, and infer an answer to her inquiry from that. (We will address later how, or even if, ‘never having mail returned’ is congruent with ‘knowing where someone is’.) That the recipient does make these inferences is displayed by her acceptance of ‘‘I have never had any of it returned’’ as a legitimate response (i.e., one not needing repair) with her ‘‘oh’’ (line 8). In fragments 13–15, the co-participants need not examine prior talk in order to arrive at an inference which will constitute a response to their inquiry; rather, these indirect responses appeal to shared knowledge, either about the world at large or knowledge specific to the two interactants. In fragment 13 (fragment 1, reproduced here), the mother’s response, ‘‘I was goin’ back on nights’’ appeals to the HV’s knowledge about the world. Instead of naming someone as the referent of the ‘‘who’’ (line 5), the mother describes what her working hours will be. From this, the HV can infer that the mother and father

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2441

will continue to be the (sole) caretakers for the baby, since the mother will be home during the day and the father at home during the night. Fragment 14 is an interaction between an employee (Skip) and his boss (Fred). Fred’s response to Skip’s inquiry appeals to their shared knowledge of how it would be possible for him to ‘‘get a message to ring Raymond Smith’’ – (only) if he did indeed ‘‘go back to work’’ (see lines 7–9). Once again, there are no linguistic means used to display a link between the two turns. Although there is a deictic link between the response and the enquiry in fragment 15 (‘‘that’’ in line 6 pronominalizes ‘‘the following weekend, line 4), the response is still indirect. It does not inherently specify whether or not he will be ‘going up the following weekend’; it only states his opinion (offered for confirmation via a tag question) that next weekend is ‘‘the vacation.’’ That a particular weekend falls within a vacation period does not preclude these participants ‘going up to Syracuse’ then. This turn (line 6) could just as easily have been designed and/or treated as the beginning of an insert sequence – Charlie could have been checking that next weekend was indeed the vacation; Ilene could have confirmed that it was, and Charlie could then have gone on to offer Ilene a(nother) ride at that time. However, Ilene’s response, ‘‘oh all right so no hassle’’ (line 7) shows that, in spite of his use of deixis, she interprets Charlie’s turn at line 6 as an indirect refusal, and that he is not checking whether or not next weekend is the vacation. Thus, they must have some kind of shared knowledge that, for them, the vacation period does preclude their travelling. The final fragment in this section, fragment 16 (a reproduction of fragment 2), combines an appeal to shared knowledge with a link to previous talk. The response ‘‘it’s in one eye’’ is a repetition of what Dana has already said – that she is only experiencing a problem with one eye (see line 2, ‘‘my eye’’ . . . ‘‘it itches’’). So, while this response picks up on and reinforces information she has already presented to her co-participant, it also forces (albeit mistakenly) the inference that the candidate diagnosis must be wrong by claiming the ailment only affects one eye (thus appealing to the ‘knowledge’ that hay fever affects both eyes equally). That Dana’s understanding of a fact about the world is incorrect is immaterial here; what is important is that she presents her understanding as the correct one, and one that ought to be shared. To sum up: the indirect responses we have collected and analysed generally lack certain structural features which are recurrently found in more direct responses (e.g. repetition, ellipsis, and pronominalization). Furthermore, and again differently from direct responses, indirect responses refer either to non-contiguous talk, prior to the inquiry; or to (shared) knowledge about the world they inhabit in order to generate inferences that will provide an answer to the inquiry. In this latter way, indirect responses are distinct from qualified or ‘‘specified’’ responses (Stivers and Hayashi, 2010). Such responses are used to resist inferences or implications of the inquiries, whereas the indirect responses on which our analysis focuses on are used to create new inferences. Most previous research into indirect responses (as well as indirect initiating turns) has inquired into how they are understood. Here, however, our focus is different. We are interested in what indirectness accomplishes; what are speakers doing when they respond indirectly? Politeness is the most commonly offered answer to this question; however, the indirect response examples provided in fragments 12–16 do not seem to be particularly polite (or impolite, for that matter). Being (or wanting to be) polite may be deserving of analysis as an activity in its own right, but a clear orientation to (im) politeness by the participants would first need to be shown (see Watts, 2003; Hutchby, 2008 for a fuller explication of this problem). There are, however, recurrent interactional issues that indirect responses are employed to manage. We call them issues rather than problems or a similarly negative term because it is only by virtue of responding indirectly that participants problematize the proposed course of action embodied in the preceding turn(s). The issues can be described as uncovering the perceived purpose or agenda displayed in the prior turn, and treating the inquiry as inapposite, e.g. lacking or deficient in some way. The following sections treat each of these activities in turn; and in the conclusion, we speculate as to another reason for employing indirect responses – taking advantage of an opportunity to launch one’s own activities as early as possible in an interaction. 3. Indirect responses uncover the perceived purpose or ‘agenda’ of the prior turn One of the main ways indirect responses are used is to uncover the perceived purpose or agenda of the previous turn. These indirect responses are designed to go straight to the heart of the project being launched (or furthered) by the inquiry; by using indirect responses, speakers can display what they take the inquirer ‘really’ to want to know. In short, these indirect responses are used to answer a question that isn’t asked, and instead respond to something like the motivation behind the question that is asked. The first example of responding to the perceived purpose of an inquiry is shown in fragment 17. When this conversation was recorded, Gordon was just about to leave for university, as were many of his friends: his girlfriend Dana still has another year of secondary school study before she goes to university. 17 IND26 Field SO882:2:8 1. 2. 3.

Dan: Gor:

I thought working (this way) would be the easy way ou:t[but uhh .hh [.t

2442

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

Gor:

Dan: Gor: Dan: Gor: Gor: Dan: Gor: Gor:

(.) ihNO:W. u-Uh:m often see Norm. (0.5) I saw him toda::[y [.tch Yea-:h,?= =A::nd (.) he sa [.hh.hh.hh.hhhh uhRi::gh[t, [So I (0.3) Okay, (0.8) Good. (0.6) all I wanted to know.

u

On the face of it, Gordon’s polar interrogative in lines 5–6 explicitly questions the frequency with which Dana sees a mutual friend, Norm. Dana’s response, however, does not address how often she sees him, but rather specifies when she last saw him and when she expects to see him again: ‘‘I saw him today and he said he’d be in tomorrow so I’d see him before he went away’’. In fact, saying that she ‘‘saw him today’’ may be offered to support the claim that she will ‘‘see him tomorrow’’. Although spread out over several lines of transcript, this utterance of Dana’s is produced with rises to the middle of her pitch range at the ends of the talk represented in line 8 and 10, and a fall to low at the end of line 12 – which is familiar as ‘list’ intonation. So, Dana is responding not to what Gordon observably (or audibly) inquires about, but what she perceives to be his agenda: finding out whether she is likely to see Norm again before he leaves for university. By responding in this way, she presents seeing Norm before he goes to university as the ‘reason’ motivating Gordon to ask the question ‘‘do you often see Norm’’; in conversation analytic terms, Dana responds to the underlying ‘why that now’ rather than to the linguistic form of the inquiry. And by doing this, her response appears to be indirect. Although Gordon has, for whatever reason, designed his inquiry to question the frequency of Dana’s contact with Norm, he does not treat her failure to give a direct answer as problematic. On the contrary, his next utterances, ‘‘okay . . . good . . . That’s all I wanted to know’’, confirm Dana’s displayed understanding as a, if not the, correct one. In short, we can say that he accepts her indirect response as correctly uncovering and addressing his agenda. Thus it seems that in this case at least, the indirect response is treated as ‘better’ than a more direct response would have been, because his statement ‘‘that’s all I wanted to know’’ displays that how often she sees Norm is actually not what is of most interest to him. Fragment 18 is another example of an indirect response that displays an understanding of the perceived purpose of the inquiry. The transcript that appears here is a longer excerpt of fragment 13. 18 IND 5 Field SO88:U:1:10

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Fre: Ski:

H'llo ((--break--)) ( ) speaking,] [.h h h h h h h]h h h hOh Fre:d, (0.3) Fre: Ye[ :s. Ski: [.hh Oh it's Ski:p..h Fre: Yes Ski[p. Ski: [.h Did you go back to wo:rk,h (0.2) Fre: I've got a me:ssage to ring Raymond Smi[th. Ski: [Oh: yes:. That's alright I just wanted to make sure: (.) whether you'd p'hh gone back or not.h ((about 30 lines omitted dealing with payments in and out of the business)) Ski: But uh dHave you rung Raymond,[h-h-h]= [(0.4)]= Fre: =No[:. Ski: [Oh .hh He didn't say what it was but somebody's given im s'm wrong information 'ee wz: oo-afraid that you might- (0.4) en'ee gave it to you: 'n you might act on it. so 'ee was rather anxious for you to ring eIther .hhhhhh later this evening .khhhhh cz 'eez out earlier

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

2443

o:n .hh ah:[:: or first thing tomorrow mor[ning [( ) [e's at home now is 'ee (d' you think) .hwhhewhh Well (.) 'ee said 'ee wz gon' to be out (.) quite a bit of the e:vening so: eIther later this evening o:r[: .hh f- first thing in the= [Yes I 'll ring im =mor[ning [I'll ring 'im t'morrow morning a[nyway. [dee Ye:s. (.) Okay Fred (0.3) Because I've gotta go: I eh I'll try to ring 'im from Bedford sometime [yea[h [((
Fre: Ski:

Fre: Ski: Fre: Ski: Ski: Fre: Ski: Ski: Fre: Ski:

Fre: Ski:

Taken out of its naturally occurring sequential environment, ‘‘I’ve got a message to ring Raymond Smith’’ might appear to be non-responsive. The co-participants, however, treat it as acceptable and comprehensible: Skip replies ‘‘Oh yes that’s alright.’’ Answering ‘‘did you go back to work’’ with ‘‘I’ve got a message to ring Raymond Smith’’ provides different information than was explicitly requested. In this case, the information provided allows the recipient to arrive at a positive response (he did go back to work) because of the co-participants’ shared knowledge of how and where Fred would ‘get a message to ring Raymond Smith’. In addition to answering positively, however, the indirect design of the response allows the speaker to display a particular understanding of why the question was asked. So in one turn, Fred is able to convey both a ‘yes’ answer, as well as to display ‘I know why you asked – because of the message’. Unlike Gordon in the prior example, Skip displays some reluctance to accept the agenda attributed to his inquiry by Fred’s indirect response. Skip claims that he ‘‘just wanted to make sure whether you’d gone back or not’’ (lines 11–12), using the ‘‘just’’ to resist Fred’s displayed conclusion that he ‘really’ called to find out whether Fred had received the message. However, later in the call it becomes apparent that Fred’s receipt of the message is indeed of paramount importance – not least because it seems Skip is the one who took the message (see line 17, ‘‘he didn’t say what it was’’). Regardless of their treatment – and Skip’s resistance is very slight – using an indirect response to uncover ulterior motives is not necessarily a censorious activity. That is, although having ulterior motives has come be to understood as a negative evaluation, these indirect responses seem designed to display alignment (but not necessarily affiliation – see Stivers (2008) on the distinction between the two) by providing information that one participant has deemed likely that their coparticipant wants or needs to know. In fragment 17, Dana’s indirect response displays her understanding that how often she has been seeing Norm is less salient than whether or not she will see him before he leaves for university; providing Gordon with this information rather than the y/n his inquiry syntactically demands, is designed to assist him. She displays her willingness to collaborate with whatever project Gordon may be proposing to undertake. Later it transpires that Gordon asks Dana to take Norm a gift, so it was indeed whether she would see Norm, and not how often, that was more pertinent. Fred’s indirect response to Skip’s inquiry does deliver the information requested, but does so by going directly to what he estimates Skip’s real concern to be – the receipt of a message that Skip himself left for Fred. Producing this indirect response instead of a simple yes or no allows him to give Skip the information as early as possible in the interaction, thereby treating the information as important – to both of them. Skip displays his orientation to the importance of this message in the closing section of the call (after an insert sequence initiated by Fred), lines 14–40: ‘‘somebody’s given him some wrong information . . . and he’s given it to you . . . he was rather anxious . . . he told you don’t act on it til you’ve spoken to him’’. Thus it seems that his earlier claim that he ‘‘just wanted to make sure whether you’d gone back or not’’ (lines 11–12) is somewhat disingenuous. Skip’s later talk belies the importance he attaches to Fred having gotten the message, not only because of what the it contains, but because (although this too is conveyed somewhat indirectly) he, Skip, took the message (see line 17). An indirect response can of course also be used to address an agenda that is less than innocent. Here we revisit fragment 12, and the question of the relationship between forwarding someone’s mail and ‘knowing where he is’. 19 IND 6 NB 1. 2. 3.

Nan:

I [just uh,h forward iz mai:l stick it in th'envelope'n (0.4)

2444

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

Nan: Emm: Nan: Emm: Nan:

Emm:

Nan:

send it all on up to im en .hhh[hhh [Yih know wher'e is the:n, (0.8) I have never had any of it retu:rned Emma,h Oh::. At a:ll, so: I just assume that the notice the e: the =telegram thet went fr'm th'bank w'ss return' because he didn't w:ant to accept it. (0.4) OH:.h

(0.4) .tch But guh nothing is been return' to me:, (.) en I've had my return address on it e.-a:nd addressed it to him at that addre:ss:,h [.hhhhhhh]h

Nancy’s indirect response resists the complex web of meanings that can be associated with ‘knowing’ a person, or knowing where a person is. The response ‘‘I have never had any of it returned Emma’’ further distances her from any involvement with the recipient of the items she consigns to the mail. This indirect response serves to emphasize the degree of her separation from her estranged husband – they don’t even share in the pseudo-interaction of him returning mail to her. Nancy thus addresses the purpose of Emma’s inquiry – that of suggesting that despite Nancy’s protestations that she has nothing to do with her estranged husband, she does in fact ‘‘know where he is’’. By refusing to accept the construction ‘‘know where he is’’, Nancy treats Emma’s inquiry as suspect, and provides additional ‘proof’ that their separation is as complete as Nancy has been describing. The indirect response allows Nancy to resist Emma’s agenda by arguing against it (see also Stivers and Hayashi, 2010). She resists the implications of ‘knowing where he is’ by stating only that the mail she sends him is not returned to her. By using this indirect response, Nancy displays that ‘‘where he is’, is not important – he (apparently) gets the mail she sends, and therefore whether he is physically present at that address is of no concern to her, and therefore should not be of concern to Emma. 4. Using an indirect response to treat an inquiry as inapposite The other principal activity managed through responding indirectly is to treat an inquiry as inapposite – as somehow inappropriate or going in the wrong direction, or asking about the wrong kind of thing. This – the indirect response – is generally achieved by making reference to some state of affairs that the recipient should know about but seems not to have taken into account in their inquiry. When used to treat an inquiry as inapposite, indirect responses are often built to display a lexico-semantic opposition with the inquiry. They thus provide for their understanding as negative responses, and are (in nearly all cases) treated and accepted as such. 20 IND29 Rahman B:1 (10) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Jen: Ver: Ver: Jen: Ver: Jen: Ver: Jen: Ver: Jen: Ver: Jen: Ver:

H'llo there Ver[a. [Hello Jenny, (.) Are yih coming down, Ehm- ah'm ^jist ah wz ^jis'comin ou:t. (.) Oh: goo[d.]Is[I ]luh(.) Is Ann coming, (0.2) Ehm- Ann is eh gone tih North Ohrmsby Market. [Oh:[I see. [.hh[Eh dju r'member she wz saying she's gotta go'n get s'm chi:na or something fr'm Stockton. Oh:: yes::,[yes.] [An' ] an' she said she hadtuh go tih North Ohrmsby Market ti[hda:y. [Ah:: that's awright then,

Fragment 20 provides a clear example of the use of an opposing term in the indirect response. ‘‘Gone’’ in line 12 contrasts with ‘‘coming’’ in the inquiry; thus, the recipient can infer a negative answer to her inquiry – if Ann is ‘‘gone’’ she cannot be

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2445

‘‘coming’’ with them. In this way, Jenny does not explicitly tell Vera whether or not Ann is coming, but rather responds indirectly to the inquiry. The design and production of this indirect response allows the speaker to point out deficiencies with the inquiry. By not responding to the syntactic design of the turn (i.e., by not employing a yes or no), Jenny treats the design as inapposite. Although there is recycling of the name ‘‘Ann’’, in this particular environment the re-use of a proper noun is unusual (Fox, 1987). By re-using the name, however, Jenny avoids creating a deictic link to the inquiry.4 Indeed, in the following talk, Jenny explicitly claims that Vera should have known Ann wasn’t coming, by prompting ‘‘dju remember. . .she said she had to go to North Ohrmsby Market today’’ (lines 14–18) – rather than waiting for Vera to display, independently, that she remembers. Vera confirms these reminders with ‘‘oh yes yes’’ and ‘‘aw that’s alright then’’, thus claiming, through her own turn design (cf. Heritage, 1984b; Betz and Golato, 2008; Emmertsen and Heinemann, 2010), that she has just remembered this information. This in turn justifies Jenny’s treatment of the inquiry as inapposite, because Vera did indeed have the information to answer her own inquiry (even though she claims to have forgotten it for that moment). By highlighting the inappropriateness of the inquiry (usually through the employment of a lexico-semantically opposite term), an indirect response allows the speaker to abdicate responsibility for the delivery of a negative response. The indirect response ‘merely’ points out some fact5; crucially, however, this fact is presented as one the co-participant also does, or should, know. And if the speaker already knows the answer to the inquiry, the inquiry itself is treatable as inapposite. In the following fragment, Bea has been trying to get her friend Ros to take on a home nursing job, but Ros hasn’t shown much interest. Ros and Bea are both nurses. 21 IND40 SBL1:1:10 3:58 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Bea: ah-hah well en they're wanting to cut do:wn a bi:t, they're wanting to make some cha:nges hh: hh would like to: uh ha:ve one:: uh R N: o:n,h (0.2) in the twenny four hours hh hh an' have: uh (2.1) yihknow a good (1.0) Ros: we:ll u-of course I am en R N, too:. En you're en R N Bea: ye:s ah[hah. Ros: [mean they might prefer en L P N (ez a twunny four shift)= Bea: =no: they want one: uh:: they want one R N: (0.4) Bea: .hhhh en that's:: the one I wz help- trying tuh help them fi:nd.h Ros: well arn'tchu going t'stay o:n? (0.2) Bea: Oh I only relie::ve:= Ros: =you only re[lie[:ve Bea: [hh [I just work two uh three days a mo:nth.h Ros: oh:

Before the inquiry that received the indirect response, Bea has provided Ros with a great deal of information about her role and about the nursing position she is recruiting for. At the beginning of the call, in response to Ros’ query about whether she is currently working on the case, Bea explains, ‘‘I relieve. It’s the one I’ve been relieving on ever since March.’’ (data not shown). Then in line 3 of the fragment shown above, she explains that the clients want to change from their current arrangements to a fully qualified nurse (an RN, or Registered Nurse) on a 24 h shift, stating this again in response to Ros’ suggestion of a less-qualified nurse (see lines 8–9). We can see, then, how Bea can come to treat Ros’ inquiry ‘‘well aren’t you going to stay on?’’ as inapposite. The way she does so is through the production of the indirect response ‘‘Oh I only relieve’’. Remember that Bea has already stated that she is a relief nurse on the case, not the main employee. The ‘‘Oh’’ and ‘‘only’’ she employs in her response highlight the opposition inherent between ‘‘relieving’’ and ‘‘staying on’’ (Heritage, 1998). As she herself goes on to point out, she only works ‘‘two or three days a month’’ (line 16). Whether or not she continues to do so would have little impact on the hiring of a new, full time nurse – a fact indexed by her use of the qualifier ‘‘only’’. Just as in fragment 20, in which a person who has ‘‘gone [somewhere else]’’ cannot be ‘‘coming [with them]’’, here, a person who ‘‘only relieves’’ cannot appropriately be said to be ‘‘staying on’’ or not; it is in fact immaterial whether Bea is staying on, since her work schedule does not meet the (new) desires of the client. Therefore, she treats the question ‘‘aren’t you going to stay on’’ as inapposite because the ‘direct’ response to it, i.e. a yes or no, has no bearing on the project she has undertaken (that of finding a new nurse).

4 The repetition of the proper noun here seems unavoidable; it is perhaps the lesser of two evils. In order to refer to the person, Jenny must use either a pronoun – which she does not to – or a proper name – which she does. This datum therefore suggests the possibility that anaphoric links between turns may mark them as more strongly linked than repetition. This is not an issue we can delve into any further here; see Stivers and Rossano (2010) for more on the related idea of gradience in linkages between initiating actions and responses. 5 Whether this fact is true or correct is immaterial; the importance is that something is presented as a fact.

2446

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

Fragment 22 is another example of an inquiry treated as inapposite by means of an indirect response that addresses and points to both the inappropriacy of a yes/no answer, and the inappositeness of asking a question to which one knows the answer. 22 IND77 CHAm4247 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

A:

B: A: B:

yeah (.) well you can be sure that we will send you information .hhhh because uh (0.5) you know I've got to go down there and we're trying to r- to improve the program we're adding .hhhh they're adding thousands of dollars of uh state of the art language e- you know equipment uh lab equipment and all of that and they're (.) restructuring everything so .hhhhhh that's what I'm supposed to do next phhhhhh do they have any scholarships for foreign students .hhhhhh I- I'm- I've never heard of a scholarship for an English language program personally b[ut I think [>we never did< either but I keep thinking I'm going to fin::d one one of these days uh huh ((laughter))

In this fragment, A and B are discussing a program for teaching English to speakers of other languages, administered by an American university. A and B are former colleagues with similar jobs (i.e., the set-up and administration of such programs). A’s response does not in this case use a simple lexical opposition as seen in the previous examples. Instead, the indirect response claims that the inquired-about object, ‘‘scholarships for foreign students’’, do not exist. As a colleague of his, as well as an administrator of similar programs for non-English speakers, B could be, and is here treated as, expected to know this. By stating a fact that both of them (should) know, A treats the inquiry as inapposite because of the implication that his program is unique in not offering a scholarship – it isn’t; in fact, he’s ‘‘never heard of a scholarship for an English language program’’. B, for her part, admits the inappropriateness of her question in her next turn. In line 11, she reveals that she was pretty sure that such scholarships don’t exist: ‘‘we never did either’’, i.e., she’s never heard of (the existence of) a scholarship for an English language program. This supports the analysis of A’s indirect response as being employed to point out a deficiency in the design of B’s inquiry – B did know that no scholarships of that type existed, but she asked anyway. A orients to the inappositeness of asking a question that one knows the answer to by responding indirectly (see Heritage and Raymond, in press; Stivers et al., 2011 for additional discussions of such epistemic struggles). Fragment 23 provides a very similar example of the use of an indirect response to point out the unavailability of the object of the inquiry. A and B are both American-born; B is currently living in the Netherlands. 23 IND 33 CHAm 4093 22:20 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

B:

A: B: B: A: A: B: B:

A:

ye-ah:::v mean >if if< if- if they denied my citizenship and I became a citizen here I probably wouldn't ha- (.) be a horror either .hh but uh (.) yeah right now I'm ((**)) I mean I do wanna keep my American citizenship so (0.5) [are you gonna become a dual] citizen [I k i n d a w a n n a ] (1.0) what's that (0.2) are you gonna try and become a dual citizen (0.8) have dual [citizenship] [y' can't ] do (0.7) y' can't do that (0.2) um: the only way to be a dual citizen is if you're born in a foreign country like if I were born in- in in: Holland and then w- and then had American parents then I could be a dual citizen but you can't- .hhhh if I were to ask to become a citizen in Holland I would automatically lose my American citizenship as far as the Americans are concerned yeah

In response to A’s inquiry about whether B will try to become a dual citizen (of the US and the Netherlands, B states the fact ‘‘you can’t do that’’. By claiming the impossibility of ‘becoming a dual citizen’, the question – more specifically, the syntactic format of the question – is treated as inapposite: to answer either yes or no implies that the inquired-about action is in fact possible, when speaker B knows it is not.

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2447

Although B’s indirect response treats A as lacking some knowledge he should have had, he continues to explain more fully why ‘‘you can’t do that’’ when B’s next turn is not immediately forthcoming (see the 0.2 s silence at line 15). This might seem to weaken the argument that B’s indirect response is employed to point out to A that this is something he should have known (i.e. something that would have prevented him from even making the inquiry); however, A attempts to treat B’s explication as something he did know, by responding ‘‘as far as the Americans are concerned yeah’’ (line 22). The lack of a turn-initial ‘‘oh’’ (Heritage, 1984b) as well as the use of a turn-final ‘‘yeah’’ both display that B’s information was not in fact news to A (Raymond, 2003; Heritage and Raymond, 2005). So it seems that A is attempting to claim to know something that contradicts the very thing he inquired about. A’s talk claims that he too takes information about citizenship as part of the world knowledge he shares with B, and thus supports our contention that one function of indirect responses is to treat inquiries as inapposite when they ask about something the inquirer should rightfully already know. In the following fragment, the inquiry takes on the role of a repair initiation – an initiation treated as inapposite because of one of the candidate hearings offered. 24 IND50 GTS 4,28 (GTS4tape 1 side b) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Ken:

Rog: Ken:

bu-that convertible we went to Huntington Beach an' he jumped. He jumped outta the convertible goin' sixty miles an hour. [big fat slob[sixteen or sixty? we-i-di-wu-we were on the f-on that Huntington Coast Road?

Roger’s interrogative request for repair, ‘‘sixteen or sixty’’, is obviously designed to do more than indicate a problem with hearing. Although to the naı¨ve overhearer the possible hearing of Ken’s ‘‘sixty’’ in line 2 as ‘‘sixteen’’ may be plausible, for these speakers in this situation it clearly is not. This fragment comes from Sacks’ ‘‘hotrodders’’ – teenage boys who make their reputations by driving fast cars (or at least talking about driving fast cars). So Roger’s offering of ‘‘sixteen’’ is hearably designed to undermine Ken’s story about reckless behavior in fast cars (‘‘he jumped outta the convertible goin’ sixty miles an hour’’). Ken’s response could be said not to deal with the repair initiation by not selecting either of the possible hearings offered; however, it fits neatly alongside our collection of indirect responses to inquiries. What Ken does is place an appeal to the shared knowledge of the group as to what speed they (as hotrodders) are likely to be going on ‘‘that Huntington Coast Road’’ as the response to this inquiry/repair initiation. His assumption that the others will know the road he means, and its characteristics, is displayed by his use of the demonstrative determiner ‘‘that’’. He thus treats Roger’s inquiry as inapposite not only by not selecting one of his candidate repairs, but by marking the question(er) as lacking basic knowledge about the road the event took place on. The next fragment again shows the use of lexico-semantic opposition to highlight the inappositeness of the inquiry. This inquiry, however, is not treated as inapposite because of a lack of real-world knowledge, but rather because of the assumptions the inquiry displays about the co-participant. The fragment comes from an interaction between a health visitor and a new mother and father, and takes place in their home shortly after the baby’s birth. 25 IND63 HV:1A1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

HV: M: F: HV: F: (): HV: M: F: M: HV: F: M: HV: F: M: HV: F:

Did you (0.6) uhm have a normal delivery,=did you wat[ch it. [Ye::s Mm hm, Did you?=What did you thi:nk. ((smile voice)) (1.0) (What it's for) hhhhh heh Pardon? Oh it w's the same [as the ones that we watched on the [It's what it's for. telly. Oh you watched it on the telly.=So it wasn't any different. I should imag[ine (0.2) yes. [Ye:::s, (1.5) ( ) were you= =it's the same, (.) Yeh [( ) [(An') then did you feel (.) thrilled or= =Oh yeh o'course.

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2448

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

M: F:

HV:

F: M: HV: M: F: M:

Yeah.= ='specially as it (w-) a girl 'cos that's what we wanted. (.) (1.0) I u:h (w's) quite alarmed the first baby I saw delivered (0.2) it looked (0.7) uhm:: (0.7) 'cos you don't a through- (.) uh- a full frontal view do you? (.) (fath[ers). [W'll I was holding 'er leg see? Ye:s. So [you- in fact you did see [the head : yeh every[think [Oh 'e [w's[Oh yeh. 'E watched it all 'e was telling me:.

The opposition pointed out in the indirect response is the difference between (not having) ‘‘a full frontal view’’ of the birth and ‘‘holding her leg’’. The father’s response in line 32 appeals to the health professional’s knowledge of where he would be and what he would be able to see if he were holding his wife’s leg during delivery – i.e., he would be facing her as she braced her leg against him, and would indeed have a ‘‘full frontal view’’. This response nominally responds only to where he was, and as such indirectly contradicts the HV’s displayed understanding that he probably didn’t have a full view of the baby’s birth. However, the indirectness of the response also displays the inappositeness of the way the inquiry is constructed – the way the inquiry displays the HV’s assumption that fathers might not necessarily want such a view. Even before the HV makes the inquiry leading to the indirect response, we see the father treating giving birth in a very matter-of-fact way. When the HV asks ‘‘what did you think’’ after learning that both mother and father had watched the delivery, he responds ‘‘it’s what it’s for’’ (line 11) and ‘‘it’s the same [as those they watched on television]’’ (line 18). He thus declines to sensationalize the event, instead treating it as ordinary and expected; not something he thinks about in any particular way at all. So he is, from the beginning, resisting any suggestion that he found being present at a birth remarkable (at least not in any negative sense). Given this prior talk, we can see how his indirect response addresses not only his physical location when the birth took place – what he saw – but how it treats the inquiry as inapposite. His response promotes his role in the birth as an active one, rather than someone who doesn’t get (and possibly doesn’t want) a ‘‘full frontal view’’. Through this response, and in the following talk in which the mother joins, the father rejects the HV’s assessment of the first birth one sees as alarming (see lines 28–29). Rather, the father reports that he saw ‘‘everything’’,6 and the mother chimes in, ‘‘he watched it all he was telling me’’ (lines 35–38), as they collaborate in providing a positive assessment of the experience. The final two examples of indirectness used to treat the prior as inapposite both employ lexico-semantic opposition to display their differences with the inquiry/inquirer. They also are both presented as a statement of fact that the inquirer ought to, but appears not to, know. In the first case, fragment 26, the recipient of the indirect response accepts the fact as pointed out in the indirect response and thus accepts the treatment of her inquiry as inapposite; however, in fragment 27, the recipient does not display such an understanding. Although in the majority of cases indirect responses succeed in conveying not only a positive or negative response, but also the understanding that the inquiry as stated was inapposite or inappropriate, these final examples show that they can also fail. Nora and Ilene are discussing dog-breeding in fragment 26. ‘‘Minx’’ and the pronoun ‘‘she’’ used throughout the fragment refer to a bitch of Nora’s. 26 IND30 Heritage I:11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Ile: Nor: Nor:

- Mi:nx is (most ahk-) she's such a funny little thing,hhh hh most o:dd (.) little creature rea::lly,= =Is she? iWe:ll yes she i::s. She's a funny- she is a funny little she's (0.2) gih- al:tering et th'moment= =(not[th't) I ca:n't- wo:rk it ou:t b't she still hasn't= h

6 Note also that the father prefaces his confirmation in line 35 that he saw everything with ‘‘Oh" – a preface which Heritage (1984a) has shown displays that ‘‘a question is problematic in terms of its relevance, presuppositions, or context.’’ In other words, answering Oh yeh, rather than just Yeh, indicates something like that the question need not have been asked. In this respect it is also relevant that the father begins answering before the Health Visitor has ‘named’ what he might have seen, i.e. he begins responding in overlap with (and therefore before) the head (lines 34 and 35).

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Nor: Ile: Nor: Ile: Nor: Ile:

2449

=uh hh £had anything y'know come on or anything li:ke [t h a t£ et the mo:ment,] [No well she's still a bit]young though isn't[she
Nora is in the midst of producing what might be understood as a mild complaint (or the beginning of a complaint) about her bitch’s failure to come into her first heat. Nora herself introduces the element of lateness by her production of ‘‘still’’ in line 7. Used in this way, ‘‘she still hasn’t had anything y’know come on or anything’’, this adverb indexes the fact that something is expected but has not yet happened. In response to this, Ilene produces the inquiry ‘‘no well she’s still a bit young though isn’t she’’. Although potentially (designed to be) supportive – along the lines of suggesting that there’s nothing unusual in Nora’s bitch not yet ‘coming on’ heat, since she’s too young – in her response Nora seems to contradict Ilene’s characterization of the bitch as too young. But she does so indirectly, by responding that Minx is a year last week. Nora thereby treats Ilene’s enquiry ‘‘she’s still a bit young though isn’t she’’ as inapposite partly because she (Ilene) was incorrect in remembering how old Minx is (by saying ‘‘she’s still a bit young though’’ Ilene is claiming some knowledge of Minx’s age); but partly also because had Minx not been old enough to begin breeding, Nora would not have been so puzzled at her not coming into heat. She would not have been puzzled (‘‘I can’t work it out’’) by her still not having ‘‘had anything come on or anything like that’’: Nora’s use of still not conveying that Minx ought to have – a matter that an expert dog breeder would be expected to judge with some accuracy. Hence she treats Ilene’s inquiry as failing to take into account that she, Nora, would know when Minx might be expected to come into heat. As noted above, Ilene displays an understanding of the indirect response as refuting her inquiry (i.e., answering it negatively): ‘‘ah yes oh well any time now then’’. By virtue of not arguing with the facts as displayed by Nora’s indirect response, she also thereby accepts that her inquiry was in some way inapposite. Participants need not, and indeed do not always, accept or acknowledge the ‘facts’ as put forward in an indirect response, as shown in the following example.

27 IND31 Heritage_undated_3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ray: good morning Mister Spanton Edg: uh::m I was wondering I spoke to you about a month ago:: (0.5) Edg: I have uh: a few small jobs here in the house (0.4) Ray: yeah (0.2) Edg: uh:m you told me that you would be fully occupied until Christmas (0.9) Ray: yea[h Edg: [I was wondering uh whether you would have a day: to: to come on over here (0.5) Ray: well I'm on holiday to the fifth officially (.) Edg: yes (0.4) Ray: but uh:a (0.7) I'll try and fit it in what have you got

Edgar has called a handyman, Ray, to inquire whether he could ‘‘come on over’’ to the house to do some minor repairs. Ray does not answer directly ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Edgar’s inquiry/request, but instead responds indirectly by telling Edgar that he (Ray) is on holiday until the fifth (of January; given this call’s location in the corpus, we can place it as taking place between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve). As with other indirect responses, this is designed to imply a contrast, here between ‘coming over’ (to do work) and ‘being on holiday’. Ray’s response treats the supposition embedded in Edgar’s inquiry/request – that he would be available to do the work immediately after Christmas – as inapposite. Edgar has been edging toward making this request from the very opening of the call, shown in the transcript from line 2. Ray, however, withholds any response other than minimal ‘‘yeah’s’’, which are themselves produced only after rather long gaps of silence (0.4 and 0.9 s each). Through this preface to his request, Edgar displays that he has inferred from Ray’s having told him that he was ‘‘fully occupied until Christmas’’ that Ray would therefore be available immediately after Christmas. It is this inference which Ray’s response

2450

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

‘resists’, i.e. that saying one is ‘busy until Christmas’ does not mean one expects to take on new work between Christmas and New Year.7 Although Edgar orients to the highly contingent nature of his request by choosing the form ‘‘I was wondering whether’’ (Curl and Drew, 2008) and by minimizing the amount of work he needs (‘‘a few small jobs’’, line 4), he does not display an understanding of Ray’s indirect response as a rejection. His only response is ‘‘yes’’, followed by a 0.4 s gap of silence. This minimal response does not treat the indirect response as a negative answer to the request because it does not accept the ‘fact’, as put forward by Ray, that he is still on holiday; it does not orient to any possible inappositeness in the inquiry (note that acknowledging a contingency is not equivalent to admitting inappropriacy). And accordingly, Ray in his next turn offers to do what is requested of him – he’ll ‘‘try and fit it in’’ (line 18). 5. Indirectness in everyday interaction To sum up, in this report we show that by responding indirectly, one participant can uncover the prior turn’s agenda, or can display to another that a previous inquiry is lacking or inapposite in some way. These indirect responses are carefully designed to point out the perceived purpose of, or putative problems with, the prior talk. The provision of a more substantive response than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, when delivered in response to a polar question, displays the speaker’s analysis of what the questioner was ‘really’ asking. In our data, this display either made clear a motive hidden in the prior inquiry, as in ‘‘I saw him today and he said he’d be in tomorrow so I’d see him before he went away,’’ fragment 17; or, it made a claim as to the inappropriacy of the inquiry, as in ‘‘well I’m on holiday to the fifth officially,’’ fragment 27. In a distinct break with traditional research into indirectness, which often focuses on the psychological conditions for felicitously doing and/or comprehending an indirect speech act, we have explicated the interactional environments in which indirectness figures. Rather than ask for judgements about the indirectness of an utterance, we have instead explored the use of indirect expressions in everyday interactions. One of the benefits of this innovative approach is that it allows us to show, in an empirically grounded way, what interactional pressures there are to respond indirectly – in effect, why speakers sometimes respond indirectly. One of the interactional pressures we note is that utterances consisting only of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ are often not treated as adequate responses, even to syntactically polar questions. Upon receiving such responses, participants regularly pursue further information. So, rather than produce responses that are only superficially matched to the syntactic structure of the prior inquiry, speakers can and do produce responses that display their analysis of the activity being pursued in that inquiry. In so doing, speakers display a level of affiliation with their interlocutors – they are attuned not just to the linguistic design of the preceding turn, but have also examined the talk for what it is doing, and are responding to that. The extra work that speakers do by responding indirectly accounts for our discovery of positive indirect responses; that is, indirect responses that are not used to say ‘no’ or to disagree with the prior turn. The conventional wisdom about indirect responses, or indirect speech acts in general, is that they are used as a way of softening rejection, or being polite. Thus it was a surprise to find several instances in the data in which indirect responses could only be glossed as saying yes, or agreeing with the prior talk (e.g. fragment 17). This provides further evidence that responding indirectly is a more general device used to display a speaker’s analysis of the action of the prior turn, rather than a device for avoiding or softening an action. Another interactional pressure that bears on the production of indirect responses is that of turn-taking in conversation (Sacks et al., 1974). After the production of a question in two-party conversation, the other participant is accountable for producing a response. However, in addition to this pressure to respond, a participant in a conversation can also take advantage of being presented with the opportunity (indeed, the responsibility) to take a turn at talk in order to do some activity not expressly provided for by the interaction so far. In other words, we propose that what we have collected here as indirect responses may be designed and produced to take advantage of an opportunity to say and do something that might otherwise not come to fruition. Rather than waiting for a sequential slot that may never arise, responding indirectly can be a means by which participants accomplish their own activities as early as possible in the interaction. These two explanations for why indirect responses are produced can come only from the analysis of naturally occurring conversations. Both explanations are deeply rooted in a close examination of the sequential placement of, and the activity accomplished by, a turn at talk. The finding that people regularly, and without giving rise to problems of understanding, respond to the action of a turn rather than its linguistic form should cause us to question the presumed association between linguistic forms and activities. Syntactic questions need not be doing questioning; indirect responses need not be polite, nor unclear or obfuscatory. For certain activities, in specific sequential locations, responding indirectly may be the most efficient form of communication.

7 A reviewer suggests that Ray’s use of word ‘‘officially" actually displays his willingness to take on any work Edgar might have, by appealing to the difference between work done ‘on the books’ and off. That is, he is ‘officially’ on vacation, but happy to be paid directly for any ‘unofficial’ work he could do. However, given the long gaps and minimal responses both before and surrounding this response, we find more evidence to support our contention that he is attempting to reject or head off the request rather than indicate his availability. ‘‘Officially" could instead index the commonsense knowledge that no one works between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and that he himself is actually staying off work until January 5 – and perhaps longer, if there is not any work to be had.

T. Walker et al. / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2434–2451

2451

References Betz, E., Golato, A., 2008. Remembering relevant information and withholding relevant next actions: The German token ‘‘achja.’’ Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (1), 58–98. Curl, Traci, Drew, Paul, 2008. Contingency and action: a comparison of two forms of requesting. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (2), 129– 153. Drew, P., Atkinson, J.M., 1979. Order in Court: Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. Macmillan, London. Drew, Paul, 2005. Conversation analysis. In: Fitch, K.L., Sanders, R.E. (Eds.), Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Erlbaum, New York. Emmertsen, Sofie, Heinemann, Trine, 2010. Realization as a device for remedying problems of affiliation in interaction. Research on Language & Social Interaction 43 (2), 109–132. Fox, Barbara, 1987. Discourse Structure and Anaphora. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gibbs, Raymond, 1979. Contextual effects in understanding indirect requests. Discourse Processes 2, 1–10. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1999. Speakers’ intuitions and pragmatic theory. Cognition 69, 355–359. Gibbs, Raymond W., 2002. A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and what is implicated. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 457–486. Heritage, John, Raymond, Geoffrey, 2005. The terms of agreement: indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68, 15–38. Heritage, John, Raymond, Geoffrey, in press. Navigating epistemic landscapes: acquiescence, agency and resistance in responses to polar questions. In: Jan Peter de Ruiter (Ed.), Questions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Heritage, John, 2002. The limits of questioning: negative interrogatives and hostile question content. Journal of Pragmatics 34, 1427–1446. Heritage, John, 1998. Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society 27, 291–334. Heritage, J., 1984a. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press, New York. Heritage, J., 1984b. A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In: Atkinson, J.M., Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 299–345. Hutchby, Ian, 2008. Participants’ orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction. Journal of Politeness Research 4, 221– 241. Holtgraves, Thomas, 1999. Comprehending indirect replies: when and how are their conveyed meanings activated? Journal of Memory and Language 41, 519–540. Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J., 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman, London. Raymond, Geoffrey, 2003. Grammar and social organization: yes/no interrogatives and the structure of responding. American Sociological Review 68, 939– 967. Sacks, Harvey, Schegloff, Emanuel A., Jefferson, Gail, 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696– 735. Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1979. Identification and recognition in telephone openings. In: Psathas, G. (Ed.), Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Erlbaum, New York, pp. 23–78. Searle, John R., 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle, John R., 1975. Indirect speech acts. In: Peter Cole, Jerry, L., Morgan, (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 261– 286. Stivers, Tanya, 2008. Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: when nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language & Social Interaction 41 (1), 31–57. Stivers, Tanya, Hayashi, Makoto, 2010. Transformative answers: one way to resist a question’s constraints. Language and Society 39, 1–25. Stivers, Tanya, Rossano, Federico, 2010. Mobilizing response. Research on Language and Social Interaction 43, 3–31. Stivers, Tanya, Steensig, Jakob, Mondada, Lorenza (Eds.), 2011. The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Richard J., 2003. Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Traci Walker is an RCUK Fellow in Communication and Language Use in Interaction at the University of York (UK). Her publications analyse the structure of language in use using the methodology of conversation analysis, with a special interest in the manipulation of fine phonetic detail to achieve particular outcomes in interaction. Paul Drew is professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language & Communication at the University of York (UK). He has published widely in Conversation Analysis, on some of the basic practices of social interaction, and is currently researching how we construct ‘action’ in interaction. He also conducts applied research, most recently for the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, on interviews with benefits claimants (with Merran Toerien). John Local is Professor of Phonetics and Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York (UK). He has published on the phonetics of talk-in-interaction, non-linear phonologies, speech synthesis and sociolinguistics. With Gareth Walker he is currently writing a book on the phonetics of talk-in-interaction.