Knowledge moves in conversational exchanges

Abstract

In Berry's (1981) classic work on exchange structure, it was argued that knowledge exchanges consist of some conversational participant who already knows the information and some conversational participant to whom the information is imparted. The former participant is commonly termed the primary knower, whereas the latter is termed the secondary knower. What is missing in Berry's model (and work that has extended Berry's model), however, is (1) an explanation of how rights and access to knowledge can be claimed or resisted on a turn-by-turn and move-by-move basis, and (2) a more elaborated conception of knowledge that goes beyond a sender/receiver model of information. Drawing from a corpus of spoken conversation from diverse sources, I extend Berry's model by showing how a participant's 'knower status' is often negotiated within an exchange. As an interpersonal resource, knowledge can be asserted, challenged, resisted, accepted, expanded, upgraded, downgraded, etc. Furthermore, I argue that 'knowledge' should be given a social/practical epistemological interpretation; from this perspective, knowledge is associated with a speaker's degree of access to information and with a speaker's rights and obligations to know.

English tag questions eliciting knowledge or action

“…As McGregor (this volume) puts it with reference to Tomasello (2014: 103), indicatives encase propositional content in modal envelopes, and it is these that are tossed back and forth in conversation. Viewing interpersonal moves as composed of modal values attaching to propositions is wholly compatible with the idea that 'primary knower' and 'secondary knower' are modal roles (Muntigl 2009: 260-261, Berry 2016, concerned with claiming, or being positioned as having, primary or secondary epistemic rights. We further put forth that the interpersonal functions involved in negotiating action are likewise typically analysable into a modal value attaching to the description of an action.…”

“…the interactant "who already knows the information", and of secondary knower, the interactant who does not know the information. Muntigl (2009Muntigl ( : 2060 argued for an update of these definitions with reference to recent thinking in Conversation Analysis according to which the asymmetry in knowledge between co-participants is not just a matter of speakers simply having more knowledge, but of speakers claiming greater epistemic authority, i.e. better access to knowledge and more rights to pronounce assessments (Heritage & Raymond 2005).…”

“…In the inferred discursive meaning of this move, the speaker functions as secondary actor. We propose that the roles of primary and secondary actor can be defined as modal roles in the deontic domain, analogous with Muntigl's (2009) definitions for primary and secondary knower in terms of claiming or assigning epistemic modal rights. A secondary actor is a speaker claiming secondary deontic rights (as in a2 in (19)) or being positioned as having these rights (as in a2 in (21)).…”

Dynamism in knowledge exchanges: developing move systems based on Khorchin Mongolian interactions

“…Such knowledge positioning of both the speaker and the addressee is also discussed in detail in Muntigl (2009) in relation to the interactants' epistemic rights and access to knowledge. Space precludes a detailed discussion of the differences between Muntigl's (2009) approach and that presented in this paper. Briefly stated, the main difference has to do with the dimension of rank.…”

“…Note that the speech roles are adopted and assigned to interlocutors as exchanges unfold and they do not necessarily reflect the reality of the interlocutors’ knowledge states (e.g. Berry, 2016: 41; Muntigl, 2009: 231). The exchange in (1) above can thus be analysed as (2).…”