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.

• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• Chapter 1: Introduction


• Chapter 2: Questions


• Chapter 3: Responses


• Chapter 4: Interjections


• Chapter 5: Repetitions


• Chapter 6: Transformations


• Chapter 7: The Modular Response Possibility Space


• Index

The Book of Answers analyzes all the ways that we confirm questions in our everyday social lives. When do we answer with Yeah rather than He is, for instance; or when do we use more complicated forms of confirming? Relying on a large corpus of naturally occurring recordings of spontaneous social interaction, Tanya Stivers analyzes what each unique way of responding allows us to do.