This article examines one practice for challenging a co-participant, the use of polar interrogatives that are unanswerable. These are questions that are designed to receive a confirming answer of the same polarity as the question, so-called `Same Polarity Questions'. Speakers accomplish this bias by formatting the question in accordance with their state of knowledge. Based on the recipient's prior turns at talk, a speaker can infer what the recipient's stance towards some matter is and use a `Same Polarity Question' to (...) assert this inference and invite the recipient to confirm the stance. However, the sequential context in which these questions are produced means that with a confirming answer the recipient is heard to be in disagreement with the speaker and can subsequently be held accountable for this disagreement. Neither is a disconfirming response a real alternative, because this would contrast with the information provided by the recipient in prior talk. As this information is what leads the speaker to convey a certain belief about the recipient, the recipient is accountable for having misled the speaker. Because both confirming and disconfirming answers are accountable and hence problematic, recipients treat this type of question as unanswerable and instead orient to it as a challenge. (shrink)

The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis, written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number (...) of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. (shrink)