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This chapter offers a detailed sequential examination of the usage of the turn-initial Polish particle no in responsive actions. It demonstrates that no represents a particular kind of epistemic stance, where it contributes a “my side” positioning of the no speaker, and in this way participates in the local management of epistemic relations between speakers of Polish. Drawing on the analysis of data from both institutional and ordinary interactions, I demonstrate that stand-alone no and no-prefaces index the stance of the current speaker towards the prior speaker’s turn or action. No operates on three layers, which are invoked by the particular sequential and activity contexts in which the particle occurs. The primary function of no is to treat the content of the prior speaker’s turn as already known or self-evident. Second, associated with that treatment, no invokes its speaker’s “my-side” perspective and alerts the recipient to a possible incongruity between the no speaker’s epistemic status vis-à-vis the recipient’s perspective. The third layer is sequential in character and drawing on the affordances created by the two other epistemic and stance-related layers, exploits these basic interactional capacities of no in a further direction. When this happens, a no-prefaced action can set a given piece of knowledge aside and hence contribute to sequence closure and coincide with a topic and/or an activity shift. Based on the analysis of both the preceding and subsequent talk surrounding no, this chapter illustrates some systematic regularities related to the usage of no, which offer empirical evidence that no is implicated in foreshadowing epistemic stance in contexts of epistemic incongruence.

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The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. “It’s not allowed to do this”). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction.” The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.