Tanya Stivers's "The Book of Answers"

Tanya Stivers is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She is the Director of the Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture and the President of the International Society for

Conversation Analysis. She has studied social interaction in clinical encounters with a focus on the way that patient interaction with physicians shapes diagnostic and treatment outcomes. Her research on everyday conversation has explored a range of aspects of response design including timing of responses, who responds, and the design of the response. She is the author of Prescribing Under Pressure: Physician-Parent Conversations and Antibiotics and the co-editor of Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Perspectives and The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation.

Stivers applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Book of Answers: Alignment, Autonomy, and Affiliation in Social Interaction, and reported the following:

If we open The Book of Answers to page 99, a reader learns the heart of the difference between answering a yes-no question with a “Yeah” type answer versus answering it with an “Of course” type answer. The difference hinges on whether the person answering the question does anything more than going along with the questioner’s agenda, agency, and design. Why might it matter? Well, let’s make this concrete with a question like “Do you wanna grab lunch?” Whereas “Yeah” goes along with the proposal hook, line, and sinker, “Of course” does something a little different: with that response, the answerer contests that the question didn’t really need to be asked because “No” wasn’t really a possible answer.

The page 99 test gives the reader a sense of this book’s mission. It happens to be partly a summary of the most common type of answers people given to yes-no questions: Yeah/Mm hm type answers or what I call “Unmarked interjections”. As such, the summary gives the reader a short version of that baseline type of answer and we get a brief introduction to one of the more unusual types of answers that contrast with unmarked interjections, “Marked interjections” like “Of course” or “Absolutely.”

At the heart of The Book of Answers is the idea that even something as small as a one or two-word answer to a simple yes-no question is part of how we build, maintain, or tear down our social relationships. Answers to the question of grabbing lunch like “Yeah”, “Mm hm”, “Sure”, “Okay”, “Of course”, “Definitely” or even “I do” or “Tomorrow” are all part of our continual interactional calibrations bringing us closer or making us more distant from those in our lives because we do a lot of our relating to one another through question-answer exchanges.

Learn more about The Book of Answers at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue