Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge

Abstract

This article considers the role of grammatical form in the construction of social action, focusing on turns that either assert or request information. It is argued that the epistemic status of a speaker consistently takes precedence over a turn's morphosyntactically displayed epistemic stance in the constitution of the action a turn is implementing. Insofar as asserting or requesting information is a fundamental underlying feature of many classes of social action, consideration of the (relative) epistemic statuses of the speaker and hearer are a fundamental and unavoidable element in the construction of social action. A range of examples illustrate patterns of convergence and divergence in the relation between epistemic status and epistemic stance.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo; University of York; the 12th International Pragmatics Association, Manchester, England; and the National Communication Association Annual Meetings, San Francisco, CA. I would like to thank Steve Clayman, Paul Drew, Nick Enfield, Kobin Kendrick, Steve Levinson, Jeff Robinson, Manny Schegloff, Tanya Stivers, and Sandy Thompson for their comments and reactions to an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹Though see Schegloff (1988). More recently Schegloff (2008) has returned to the fray.

²In the following case, B interprets A's announcement in terms of his K+ knowledge of his fitness routine and is subsequently corrected:

Table

³As Levinson (in press) notes, “Grammars mostly say that in these cases questions are marked intonationally with rising intonation. However, every corpus study ever done on such languages, or on languages like English that uses declaratives as polar questions most of the time, has falsified this. The interpretative procedures are actually likely to be pragmatic.”

⁴The existing literature (e.g., Han, 2002; Sadock, 1974) tends to stress that these “rhetorical questions” gain their primary force from the fact that their recipients are invited to affirm a proposition to which they have shown themselves to be opposed (often in the context of argument). However, the inverted epistemic positions of the protagonists—in which the questioning is about a matter to which the questioner, and not the recipient, has primary epistemic rights—seems fundamental.

⁵The increasing value, complexity and, ultimately, necessity of “keeping score” of the multiple epistemic domains of numerous interlocutors in interaction may be a factor driving the evolution of greater cortical volumes associated with increased group sizes described by Dunbar (2003).