Treating something as self-evident

Abstract

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.

Rule Talk: Instructing Proper Play With Impersonal Deontic Statements

“…Note also that all impersonal deontic statements in earlier examples were prohibitive ("it is not allowed") or restrictive ("it is only allowed next round"), whereas Krysia's impersonal TCU is a positive statement of necessity. Artur's nho:: in line 6, a confirming particle expressing the self-evident nature of what is confirmed (Weidner 2018), corroborates the action of chastising Daniel, while also aligning with the decision to let the violation go on this occasion.…”

Taking Issue with a Question While Answering It: Prefatory Particles and Multiple Sayings of Polar Response Tokens in French

“…The interactional accomplishment of displaying that an answer is self-evident has been observed in various languages (Bolden, 2018;Hayashi & Hayano, 2018;C. W. Raymond, 2018;Weidner, 2018;Wu & Heritage, 2017). Furthermore, it is probably no coincidence if in many languages turn-initial elements have emerged that help express precisely that-given the strong constraints established by questions, particularly polar questions, participants are highly sensitive to departures from the projected response already at the very beginning of the turn (Heritage, 2013).…”