Beyond Answering: Repeat-Prefaced Responses in Conversation

Abstract

The article presents a conversation analytic investigation of one technique for responding to questions in naturally occurring social interactions: repeating the question verbatim in part or as a whole before providing a required response. A close examination of production features of repeat prefacing in Russian demonstrates that it is used by conversationalists to resist agendas and presuppositions generated by questions and other sequence initiating actions. The study shows that some repeat prefaces characterize questions as problematic by contesting or outright rejecting its presuppositions or implications. Depending on how precisely repeat prefaces are articulated, they may also display the speaker's difficulty in retrieving requested information. The study extends our understanding of devices conversationalists can deploy to resist, sidestep, or curtail the constraints imposed by questioners' interactional agendas, thereby providing an insight into how communicative goals are discerned, responded to, and negotiated in social interaction. Keywords: Questions and Answers; Conversation Analysis; Russian Language; IntonationThis article examines a communicative strategy for resisting goals or agendas in conversation. The focus is on a discursive move a respondent can make to tacitly characterize the action to which they are responding (e.g., a question, a request, or an offer) as in some way problematic, inapposite, or inaccurate. The practice, referred to as ''repeat prefacing,'' consists of repeating verbatim (part of) the initiating action prior to responding to it.

Other-initiated repair in English

“…Finally, the core collection also excluded repeats with final-rising intonation that function as answer prefaces (Schegloff, 1997;Bolden, 2009), other-initiations of repair in reported speech (e.g., I was like, excuse me), and laughter-infused repeats that formally resemble other-initiations but do joke appreciation (Jefferson, 1972).…”

Show that you know – Explanations, interactional identities and epistemic stance-taking in family talk and peer talk

“…These studies show, how participants employ procedures -such as no-knowledge-responses, no-knowledge-prefaces (Keevallik, 2011) or question-repeats (Bolden, 2009) -to problematize epistemic responsibility in a conversational sequence and/or to "resist, sidestep, or curtail the constraints imposed by questioners' interactional agendas" (Bolden, 2009, p. 140). …”

“…On a related note, recent conversation analytic studies on techniques of delaying or avoiding answering in question-answer-sequences (Bolden, 2009;Keevallik, 2011) are of particular relevance for the study at hand. These studies show, how participants employ procedures -such as no-knowledge-responses, no-knowledge-prefaces (Keevallik, 2011) or question-repeats (Bolden, 2009) -to problematize epistemic responsibility in a conversational sequence and/or to "resist, sidestep, or curtail the constraints imposed by questioners' interactional agendas" (Bolden, 2009, p. 140).…”

Other-initiated repair in Italian

“…Repeats with a similar function have been identified in English (Jefferson 1972;Quirk et al 1972;Robinson and Kevoe-Feldman 2010;Sidnell 2010;Robinson 2013), German (Selting 1996), Finnish (Sorjonen 1996), Chinese (Wu 2006), and Russian (Bolden 2009). Benjamin and Walker (2013) analyse a similar repeat practice in English, the function of which is to convey that the target utterance is "wrong and in need of correction" (p. 108).…”