Word Order Affects Response Latency: Action Projection and the Timing of Responses to Question-word Questions

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relation between word order and response latency, focusing on responses to question-word questions. Qualitative (multimodal) and quantitative analyses of naturally occurring conversations in French—where question-words can occur in initial, medial, or final position within the question—show that variation in word order affects the timing of responses. It is argued that this is so because word order provides a differential basis for action ascription, creating different temporal opportunities for projecting the recipient’s next relevant action. The frequent occurrence of early responses to questions with an initial question-word, in particular, stresses the importance of the recognition point of an action under way for response timing and shows respondents’ pervasive orientation to sequential progressivity. Findings highlight how lexico-syntactic trajectories of emergent turns, prior talk and actions, material and bodily features of interaction, and participants’ shared expectations conspire in shaping the time-courses of action ascription and action projection.

Acknowledgement

This research was carried out with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant 10001F_178819. I thank Arnulf Depperman and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Coveney (2011) identifies 10 variants for what in French is called “interrogation partielle” (i.e., QW question).

2. The occurrence in turn-final position, as illustrated in (2), should not be confounded with English questions such as “she called when,” often with a focal accent on the QW, which are likely to be heard as repair initiations (Levinson, 2013, p. 112). By contrast to English, the turn-final positioning of QWs is a common way of offering an information request in conversational French.

3. Preverbal position of the QW may also be realized with Q + est-ce que + SV (qu’est-ce qu’elle fait? “what is she doing”) or with VS-inversion (comment fait-elle ça  “how does she do it”); the former is rare and the latter nonexistent in the conversational data analyzed here.

4. Of the stand-alone question words, two were part of prepositional phrases: à quelle heure “at what time,” de quoi “of what”; of the pre-verbal QW questions, two were formatted as clefts c’est qui qui “it’s who that” and one as qu’est-ce que-question, with the QW que plus the question marker est-ce que preceding SV; of the postverbal QW questions 11 where formatted as right-dislocations; see Pekarek Doehler et al. (2015) for the frequent use of dislocated constructions in conversational French.

5. I thank Ioana-Maria Stoenica for her help with the quantitative data overview.

6. The latter was addressed through case-by-case sequential analysis rather than on formal grounds. Fox and Thompson (2010) argue, based on English conversational data, that clausal responses to QW questions, as opposed to phrasal ones, typically treat the question or sequence as problematic and come in with a preface or a delay. This formal differentiation was not applied to the data for reasons of consistency, as some QW questions call for clausal rather than phrasal responses (e.g., “why did he leave?”; “what did you do to him?”), and hence the distinction is not uniformly applicable to all QW questions in the data.

7. Kelly and Local (1989) show that our impression of timing in turn-transition is not a function of absolute time as measured in milliseconds, but depends on speech rhythm and is hence context-sensitive.

8. See Background, above, for how this relates to existing research on the median gap between questions and answers in other languages.

9. The remaining seven answers that come in timely occur in interactional contexts that make the question and its focal object highly anticipatable in the course of its production. One example is a participant’s telling about a friend’s birthday party and the co-participant asking tu lui as offert quoi? “you offered him what” (PC_19), where the occurrence of the predicate offert projects the turn as an inquiry about the gift that was given to the friend.

10. Stivers et al. (2009, pp. 10,590) write: “Language structure does not explain the variance we observe. Languages that mark questions using a sentence-final marker might plausibly have been associated with slower responses because the fact that the utterance is a question may not be evident until the very end of the turn. However, Japanese, Korean, and Lao all use sentence-final marking for questions, yet they do not cluster together within the cross-language range of mean turn offsets […]. A converse prediction, that languages like Danish, Dutch, and English, which tend to mark questions at the beginning of a turn, would allow faster responses, also turns out not to hold up. These 3 languages similarly do not cluster together […].”