Questions: Opening Participation, Displaying Expertise, and Challenging

Abstract

In keeping with the combined goals of documenting women’s skill at speaking up in the meetings and also contributing to a CA-based understanding of meeting interactions more generally, this chapter reports on interactional functions accomplished or set in motion through the action of questioning. Questions in themselves would not have stood out were it not for the fact that the action of questioning, in these data, regularly leads to further participation; that is, sequences initiated by questioning actions regularly open at least one further opportunity for the initial questioner to speak again. In addition, questioning turns can serve as knowledge displays and they can present challenges to other participants. Thus special attention to questioning is warranted not by a particular interest in question forms per se, but by the fact that, within the larger set of women’s turn initiations, questioning serves to shift the local organization of participation and the local sense of who is in control of knowledge. From another perspective, however, the fact that questioning serves to bring women into participation in these meetings is notable in relation to some early research on women, men, and questions. Certain question forms have been associated with relative lack of power and even insecurity. The current findings suggest another perspective on the function of questions.