Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b95js Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T22:14:00.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Right connections: Acknowledging epistemic progression in talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2007

ROD GARDNER
ROD GARDNER
Affiliation:
Linguistics, School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Mounth Gravatt Campus, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan III, Australia, r.gardner@griffith.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It is proposed that the response token Right, in one important use, is a marker of epistemic dependency between two units of talk by a prior speaker, and that this talk has progressed the understanding by the Right producer of a complex activity involving much information transfer. Two other Rights as response tokens are considered: as an epistemic confirmation token similar to That's right, and as a change-of-activity token similar to Alright/Okay. In addition, Right is shown to be different from other response tokens, including the news receipt Oh, newsmarkers such as Really?, and continuers and acknowledgment tokens such as Mm hm and Yeah. The primary data consist of a fully transcribed dietetic consultation in an Australian hospital between a dietician and a client.This article has been evolving for nearly ten years, and I wish to thank numerous members of a range of audiences for their stimulating questions. I also wish to thank four anonymous reviewers whose penetrating questions led to two fairly radical rethinks of the arguments and organization. I would particularly like to thank Keith Abbott, who was in the audience for what I hope was the last oral presentation of this paper. He provided extensive written feedback and really put me on the track of epistemic progression marking as being the best characterization of this response token.

Keywords

response tokenslistenertalk-in-interactionepistemic tokenmedical discourse
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 319 - 341
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Atkinson, J. Maxwell (1992). Displaying neutrality: Formal aspects of informal court proceedings. In Drew &Heritage (eds.), 199–211.
Beach, Wayne (1993). Transitional regularities for ‘casual’ “Okay” usages. Journal of Pragmatics 19:325–52.Google Scholar
Boyd, Elizabeth, & Heritage, John (2006). Taking the patient's medical history: Questioning during comprehensive history taking. In John Heritage & Doug Maynard (eds.), Communication in medical care: Interactions between primary care physicians and patients, 151–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Bublitz, Wolfram (1989). Ausdrücke des Kenntnisnehmens (Hörersignale) oder des Stellungnehmens (Redebeiträge): yes und verwandte Formen. Folia Linguistica 23:67–104.Google Scholar
Clancy, Patricia; Thompson, Sandra; Suzuki, Ryoko; & Tao, Hongyin (1996). The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin. Journal of Pragmatics 26:355–87.Google Scholar
Clayman, Steven (1992). Footing in the achievement of neutrality: The case of news-interview discourse. In Drew &Heritage (eds.), 163–98.
Drummond, Kent, & Hopper, Robert (1993). Back channels revisited: Acknowledgement tokens and speakership incipiency. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26:157–77.Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia, & Thompson, Sandra (1996). Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. In Elinor Ochs Emanuel Schegloff & Sandra Thompson (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 134–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Gardner, Rod (1997). The conversation object mm: A weak and variable acknowledging token. Research on Language and Social Interaction 30:131–56.Google Scholar
Gardner, Rod (2001). When listeners talk: Response tokens and recipient stance. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRef
Goodwin, Charles (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In George Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 97–121. New York: Irvington.
Guthrie, Anna (1997). On the systematic deployment of Okay and Mmhmm in academic advising sessions. Pragmatics 7:397–415.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action, 299–347. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society 27:291–334.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (2002). Oh-prefaced responses to assessments. In Cecilia E. Ford Barbara A. Fox & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), The language of turn and sequence, 81–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heritage, John, & Raymond, Geoffrey (2005). The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 68:15–38.Google Scholar
Heritage, John, & Sefi, Sue (1992). Dilemmas of advice: Aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions between health visitors and first-time mothers. In Paul Drew & John Heritage (eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings, 359–417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jefferson, Gail (1983). Two explorations of the organization of overlapping talk in conversation: Notes on some orderliness in overlap onset. Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature, No. 28. Tilburg: Tilburg University.
Jefferson, Gail (1984). Notes on a systematic deployment of the acknowledgement tokens ‘yeah’ and ‘mm hm’. Papers in Linguistics 17:197–216.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (1993). Caveat speaker: Preliminary notes on recipient topic-shift implicature. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26:1–30.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (2002). Is “no” an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(−) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34:1345–83.Google Scholar
Maschler, Yael (2002). On the grammaticization of ke'ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’, in Hebrew talk-in-interaction. Language in Society 31:243–76.Google Scholar
Maynard, Doug (1997). How to tell patients bad news: The strategy of ‘forecasting.’ Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine 64:181–82.Google Scholar
Maynard, Doug (2003). Bad news, good news. Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCarthy, Michael (2003). Talking back: “Small“ interactional response tokens in everyday conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36:33–63.Google Scholar
Müller, Frank-Ernst (1996). Affiliating and disaffiliating with continuers: Prosodic aspects of recipiency. In Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen andMargret Selting (eds.), Prosody in conversation: Interactional studies, 131–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Schegloff, Emanuel (1982) Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk, 71–93. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel (1993) Reflections on quantification in the study of conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26:99–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel (2007) Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel, & Sacks, Harvey (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 8:289–327.Google Scholar
Sorjonen, Marja-Leena (1996). On repeats and responses in Finnish conversations. In Elinor Ochs Emanuel Schegloff & Sandra Thompson (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 277–327. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Stenström, Anna-Brita (1987). Carry-on signals in English conversation. In W. Meijs (ed.), Corpus linguistics and beyond, 87–119. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Tapsell, Linda (1997). Client-centred practice: An interactional case study of dietary counselling. Health 1:107–20.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth, & Dasher, Richard (2002). Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Kimberley (1999). Functional variation of Okay/Alright usage in spoken discourse. Special Project, University of New South Wales, Semester 2, 1999.