Taking Issue with a Question While Answering It: Prefatory Particles and Multiple Sayings of Polar Response Tokens in French

Abstract

This article examines three practices in responses to polar questions in French: prefacing a polar response token (e.g., oui ["yes"] or non ["no"]) with the particle ah (e.g., ah oui), prefacing with the particle ben (e.g., ben oui), and producing more than one token (e.g., oui=oui). The analysis suggests that such responses serve to take issue with the question; specifically, respondents display the answer to be obvious or redundant, challenge the questioner's unknowing stance, or disalign with the further action implications of the question while still providing a polar answer. Comparisons are made with other practices for exerting agency in responses and with resources described for other languages. The resources available in French help participants differentiate in which way the respondent takes issue with the question, notwithstanding significant local particularization by reference to the specific question and its context. Data are in French, with English translation. Question-answer pairs are an essential locus of microlevel social organization, constituting a pervasive and fundamental sequence-organizational format that underpins a vast range of social activities. The respondent in a question-answer sequence is constrained to acting within a tightly organized normative structure involving projections and expectations as well as consequences that will follow any departure from what is expected. This is particularly clear for polar questions, where (in many languages) respondents are normatively expected to produce an item from a very limited set of polar response tokens. Conversation-analytic research is beginning to map the resources that respondents have for exerting social-interactional agency and asserting their own agenda or perspective. One method for departing from the constraints of a polar question is to provide a response that is not type-conforming, i.e., one that does not involve some form of a polar response token such as yes/no in English, or oui/non in French, and thus does not follow the normative response requirements imposed through particular question types (G. Raymond, 2003). With nonconforming responses, respondents can thus, e.g., answer the question while adjusting the terms, answer the question while correcting its presuppositions, or evade the question altogether. Nonconforming responses are a vital resource for embodying agency and carry with them their own implications of inferences that questioners can (and do) draw upon receipt of such responses. However, previous work has also shown that even type-conforming responses can be used in such a way as to allow the respondent a more agentive role in the emerging sequence and activity. This article examines three such practices, and I argue that respondents deploy them to take a stance toward a question while answering it by prefacing CONTACT Rasmus Persson

Multimodal Assemblies for Prefacing a Dispreferred Response: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis

“…The turn-initial ben: ‘well’ and the subsequent chais p→as operate a division of labor. French ‘ben’ is a multifunctional particle, which, in turn initial position in second pair parts, has been found to accomplish such various things as introducing dispreferred responses, indexing contestation of the relevancy of a prior question, prefacing an incipient topical shift or opening a conclusive remark ( Bruxelles and Traverso, 2001 ; Persson, 2020 ). It is hence an “elusive” ( Heritage, 2015 ) particle similarly to English ‘well’ that, in responses to questions, can signal various types of departures, ranging from dispreference or non-straightforwardness, through resistance regarding the relevance of a question, to steering away from what precedes.…”

“…Julie’s response (l.03) bears typical traits of a dispreferred response ( Sacks, 1987 ), i.e., one that does not align with the terms of the sequence-initial action: It starts with a delay, and is be:n ‘well’-prefaced (cf. Davidson, 1984 ; for French ‘ben’ see Bruxelles and Traverso, 2001 ; Persson, 2020 ). This is followed by a morphophonologically reduced and prosodically backgrounded (speedup of tempo) variant of je sais pas ‘I don’t know,’ namely ch’p a s ‘dunno,’ which is prosodically packaged together with what follows into a single prosodic unit, rather than standing as an independent unit.…”

“…So-called ‘preferred’ next actions are those that are most cooperative, allow the interaction to move forward and align with the action which they respond to Sidnell (2011 , p. 81), such as granting a request or answering a question. 3 The preference status of actions is reflected in their design, most centrally in their timing and more generally in what Sacks (1987) referred to as their ‘contiguity’: Preferred next actions tend to be delivered right away, while dispreferred actions tend to be delayed and pushed further back in the turn by means of pre-beginnings (such as uhm or inbreaths), hedging, and turn-prefaces ( Sacks, 1987 ), including turn-initial particles such as well in English ( Davidson, 1984 ; Heritage, 2015 ), ben in French ( Bruxelles and Traverso, 2001 ; Persson, 2020 ) or nu/nå across a range of European languages ( Auer and Maschler, 2016 ). That is, participants deploy a set of conventionalized practices through which they accomplish alternative types of responsive actions.…”

Conversation and Culture

“…French and German conversation is frequently studied in CA. Research on French conversation includes topics of question-answer sequences (Persson 2020b), self-and other-repetition (Persson 2020a), relative clauses used as increments (Stoenica & Pekarek Doehler 2020), giving praise to children (Aronsson & Morgenstern 2021), and recruitments on a cooking show . Studies of German conversation discuss the usage of formats like insubordinate conditional clauses , right-dislocated complement clauses (Proske & Deppermann 2020), and eben (Betz & Deppermann 2018) or okay (Oloff 2019) as response tokens; issues of alignment (Zinken 2020b) and interaction during card games (Taleghani-Nikazm et al 2020) and while driving (De Stefani et al 2019, Deppermann 2019; and formats for second-person reference (always interesting in languages with tu/vous distinctions) (Droste & Günthner 2020).…”

The Grammar of Obviousness: The Palm-Up Gesture in Argument Sequences

“…For a parallel analysis of prefatory particles and obviousness in French (e.g., ah oui), seePersson (2020).Frontiers in Communication | www.frontiersin.org November 2021 | Volume 6 | Article 663067…”