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Conférences sur invitation
Arnulf Deppermann
Universität Mannheim (DE)
The emergence of common ground over interactional histories – the case of psychotherapy
Karolina Grzech
Universitat de València (ES)
Evidentiality in talk-in-interaction: much more than information source
Johanna Miecznikowski
Università della Svizzera italiana (CH)
Specifying information source in interaction: the example of noticings
Simona Pekarek Doehler
Université de Neuchâtel (CH)
I don’t know at the grammar-body interface: a cross-linguistic analysis
Arnulf Deppermann
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Universität Mannheim (DE)
The emergence of common ground over interactional histories – the case of psychotherapy
In studies of social interaction, displays, negotiation and transmission of knowledge and the emergence of common ground usually are researched on the level of sequences of interaction, e.g., question-answer, instruction-compliance, etc. However, it is evident that common ground between participants emerges over extended series of interactions as well. In addition to sequences, cross-sequential and cross-event relationships of adding to, updating of, and revising common ground play an important role for the emergence of shared knowledge, social relationships, and the accomplishment of joint action. However, interactional histories that span over series of interactions have only very rarely been studied yet, and they pose very specific requirements on data-sampling.
In my talk, I will report on a study of the emergence and change of common ground over the course of psychotherapy sessions. I will track how therapist and patient, starting with divergent understandings of the sources of patient’s problems, come to develop a shared view over iterated topicalizations of the same conceptual domains pertaining to the patient’s problems. I will show that the development of common ground not only has a prospective, emerging dimension, but also a retrospective dimension: Participants presuppose and refer back to concepts, positions, and agreements that have been established on prior occasions by various explicit and indexical means. In this way they make use of their shared interactional history as a resource of economical and partner-specific recipient design that rests on shared meanings, which at times can be intransparent to an overhearer who does not know their history. Data come from psychodynamic psychotherapy in German.
Karolina Grzech
Universitat de València (ES)
Evidentiality in talk-in-interaction: much more than information source
Evidentiality is most often defined as a linguistic category indicating the ‘source of information’ for what is being said (cf. Aikhenvald 2004). The example from Cuzco Quechua (Quechuan, Peru, Faller 2002: 122) demonstrates how it can work in a language where this category is expressed by dedicated morphemes:
Parashanmi ‘It is raining’ [the speaker sees the rain]
Parashanchá ‘It is raining’ [the speakers conjectures it without observing the rain]
Parashansi ‘It is raining’ [the speaker was told by another person]
As these examples suggest, the use of evidentials does not change the propositional content of the utterance. Rather, it adds an additional layer of meaning (cf. Faller 2002; Boye 2012), the precise nature of which varies between languages and remains an object of study and debate.
Nonetheless, in line with the definition of evidentiality given above, this additional layer is widely assumed to indicate ‘how the speaker knows’ in all languages with evidential markers. However, a growing body of descriptive research shows that evidentials do more than that.
When we analyse interaction rather than isolated sentences, we find that, across the languages where they are attested, evidentials signal not so much the type of evidence, as the basis on which the proposition should be integrated with what is already known. Source of evidence is relevant, but not key for how they are used and interpreted. In interaction, evidentials appear to be structuring knowledge and providing interpretative cues to make communication more effective, encoding meanings related to the distribution of knowledge in interaction, epistemic stance and status, discursive and social roles of the interlocutors, etc.
This talk has three main objectives. Firstly, I will demonstrate how interactional data from under-described languages supports the observation that evidentials vary in terms of their meaning and their interactional functions. Secondly, I will show that, in line with the above, interactional uses of grammatical evidentials attested in under-described languages, and those of ‘evidential strategies’ (cf. Aikhenvald 2004) attested e.g. in standard average Indo-European languages, have much more in common than is acknowledged by the current scholarship. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these observations for comparative research on evidentiality, focusing on the issue related to comparing evidential data across spoken corpora of different languages, especially when these corpora differ in size, levels of annotation, represented genres, or the numbers of represented speakers.
Johanna Miecznikowski
Università della Svizzera italiana (CH)
Specifying information source in interaction: the example of noticings
The study of evidentiality within interactional linguistics has been influenced by work in CA on epistemics (Pomerantz 1980, Kamio 1994, Heritage/Raymond 2005, Stivers, Mondada, Steensig 2011), which is discussed in evidential typology (cf. e.g. Mushin 2013, Bergqvist/Kittilä 2020, Sandman/Grzech 2022) and applied in descriptive studies of evidential markers (e.g. Jacquin 2022, Miecznikowski/Battaglia/Geddo in press). I sketch a complementary approach that starts out from sequential categories and investigates the associated evidential resources, including grammatical/lexical means, argumentation, embodied conduct and implicit meanings (cf. also Miecznikowski 2020). It offers different opportunities for a dialogue between linguistics and CA, as will be shown here discussing the example of noticings.
Schegloff (2007:219) defines noticings as sequence-openers that speakers present as being an “outcome” of a “source” element in the setting, which typically was not attended to previously and which they retrospectively make relevant and categorize, while projecting further actions. The “outcome” relation appears to be, partly, of an evidential sort, since a verbalized noticing is typically “occasioned by a perceptual/cognitive one” (Schegloff 2007: 87, fn. 17). Multimodal analyses of noticings show that the public display of direct perception plays an important role (Kääntä 2014, Mondada 2014:382-383, Haddington/Kamunen/Rautiainen 2022); examples categorized as noticings further suggest that these actions are possible sites for markers of inference based on perceptual cues (e.g.Kärkkäinen 2007:193-194, Kendrick 2019:258, Mondada 2014:382-383).
I look at a collection of noticings taken from the videorecorded TIGR corpus of spoken Italian (SNSF grant no. 192771), consider the role of information source type and engagement in the formation of this action type, and point out theoretical implications for evidential typology. The analysis shows that noticings are compatible with various direct and indirect information sources, as long as the acquisition of knowledge occurs during the on-going interaction. It thus suggests the emic relevance of a distinction between in situ vs. past sources (cf. also Geddo, in preparation), to be interpreted within the current typological debate about evidentiality and mirativity (Aikhenvald 2021). As to verbal evidential means, a frequent construction is guarda ‘look’ (cf. Ghezzi 2012), a polyfunctional booster and promoter of intersubjective visual access. Other constructions help speakers perform evidential fine-tuning within the inferential domain (cf. Dendale & Miecznikowski in press); they add semantic specificity that distinguishes them from multimodal and deictic means, which attract the participants’ attention to perceptual cues, but cannot index the kinds of reasonings to be performed on the basis of those clues.
Simona Pekarek Doehler
Université de Neuchâtel (CH)
I don’t know at the grammar-body interface: a cross-linguistic analysis
When people say ‘I don’t know’ they may get a range on interactional jobs accomplished other than claiming lack of knowledge. For instance, they may resist a line of questioning or stir away from a topic (Beach & Metzger 1997; Hutchby 2002). They may also use the expression with reduced semanticism as an interaction-organizational marker (for an overview see Lindström, Maschler & Pekarek Doehler 2016). In this talk, I examine the use of expressions of the type ‘I don’t know’ as markers for projecting dispreferred responses, i.e., responses that disagree or disalign with the terms set up by the prior speaker’s action.
Based on data from naturally occurring conversations in five languages from distinct language (sub)families (Czech, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, Romanian), I document a multimodal practice that speakers deploy recurrently when providing a dispreferred response. The practice involves the verbal delivery of a turn-initial expression corresponding to ‘I don’t know’ and its variants (‘dunno’) coupled with gaze aversion from the prior speaker; this practice differs from speakers’ ‘literal’ use of ‘I don’t know’, which tends to be delivered with gaze on recipient – at least in ordinary conversation. Through the said practice, respondents preface a dispreferred response, alerting co-participants to incipient resistance to the constraints set out or to the stance conveyed by the prior action. The ‘multimodal assembly’ is found in dispreferred responses to questions, assessments, proposals and informings. This provides one piece of evidence for how participants’ multimodal conduct maps onto one of the basic organizational principles of social interaction: preference organization – and how it does so in a similar manner across different languages.
The findings deepen our knowledge of the type of turn-initial particles pertaining to preference organization, and shed further light on how verbal and bodily conduct interface in social interaction. They amplify prior observations according to which gaze aversion is found with dispreferred responses (Kendrick & Holler 2017, Robinson 2020) by showing that this association is valid across a range of sequence and action types, and across genetically different languages. Such evidence opens a window onto cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and cross-cultural consistencies in human interactional conduct. Yet, it also begs the question ‘why’: Why would an epistemic expression like ‘I don’t know’ lend itself to the purpose of prefacing dispreferred responses? I address this question in the conclusion of this talk.
This presentation has grown out of a collaboration with H. Polak-Yitzhaki, X. Li, I. Stoenica, M. Havlík, and L. Keevallik.