How a Terminal Tag Can Display Epistemic Stance and Constrain Responses: The Case of Oder Nicht in German

ABSTRACT

This conversation analytic study explores German turn-final oder nich(t), as in Soll ich jetzt weiterlesen oder nicht (“should I continue reading or not”). These oder nicht-appended questions raise one state of affairs and invoke its negated version via oder nicht. They emerge in environments in which epistemics and/or deontics are negotiated. Through these turns, participants index their commitment to the likelihood of the state of affairs expressed in the question. Oder nicht works as an epistemic stance marker and minimizes the potential for disconfirmation. As such, oder nicht is a resource for questioners to design their questions in ways that index their stance that an agreeing response is more likely. Thus, oder nicht effectively constrains the recipient’s options (similar to English polarized tag questions). Data are in German with English translations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ “Or not” is a literal translation of oder nicht. Although the availability of a literal translation does not automatically indicate identical interactional functions in both languages (Betz & Golato, 2008), we have opted to use the literal translation given that our analysis of a small collection of English or not turns suggests that it might be used for similar functions.

² Although we use punctuation marks to represent the intonation contour of the host TCU, the punctuation marks do not represent phonation breaks between the host TCU and the tag.

³ We are grateful to reviewers for inspiring this line of thinking.

⁴ For an overview of research on turn-final conjunctions, see Drake (2015). Work on tags exists in English (Barth-Weingarten & Couper-Kuhlen, 2002; Drake, 2015; Hepburn & Potter, 2009, 2011; Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Holmes, 1982; Lakoff, 1975; Mulder & Thompson, 2008; Walker, 2012), Estonian (Keevallik, 2008), Farsi (Taleghani-Nikazm, 2015), Finnish (Koivisto et al., 2011; Laury & Seppänen, 2008), French (Beeching, 2002), Italian (Tomaselli & Gatt, 2015), Swedish (Lindstrom, 1997), and from a cross-linguistic perspective (Barron et al., 2015; Mithun, 2012; Tottie & Hoffmann, 2006).

⁵ We did not find examples in our own or in the FOLK data of oder etwa nicht (“or not”—but intensified via the particle etwa).

⁶ We use the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson (Heritage & Atkinson, 1984). Additional notations include: “_” for level intonation, “?” for rising intonation, “,” for slightly rising intonation, “;” for slightly falling intonation, and “.” for falling intonation.

⁷ Note that this turn, which has a challenging function, invokes the possibility that the speaker is wrong about the proposition. It is thus somewhat similar to an oder nicht. Further work would have to show if these constructions indeed perform the same function.