The Epistemic Engine: Sequence Organization and Territories of Knowledge

Abstract

This article reviews a range of conversation analytic findings concerning the role of information imbalances in the organization of conversational sequences. Considering sequences launched from knowing and unknowing epistemic stances, it considers the role of relative epistemic stance and status as warrants for the production of talk and as forces in the process of sequence production and decay.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Steve Clayman, Paul Drew, Nick Enfield, Kobin Kendrick, Steve Levinson, and Sandy Thompson for their comments and reactions to an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹See also Schegloff's discussion of “composite” postexpansions (Schegloff, 2007, pp. 127–142).

²In a parallel analysis, Goodwin (1986, p. 298) describes a wife's launch of a story that is managed by saying “Mike siz there w'z a big fight down there las'night.” Here Mike's wife, Phyllis, is not the direct experiencer of the event (though evidently she has been told about it), and she uses this report to invite Mike to describe the event to the other conversational participants present who are unaware of the event or its details.

³The use of questions to replace, and thereby elide, the production of actions due next was initially observed in Sacks's first lecture on conversation (Sacks, 1992a, pp. 3–11), and indeed there is a formal parallel between the sequence described by Sacks and the sequence described here. See also Heritage (2011).

⁴As part of this process, K− initiations frequently, though tacitly, select next speakers (Lerner, 2003;Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Lerner (2003,p. 190) notes that “when the requirements for responding to a sequence-initiating action limit eligible respondents to a single participant, then that participant has been tacitly selected as next speaker.”

⁵I owe this example, and its analysis, to Tanya Stivers.

⁶Jenny's untranscribable start (line 10) is oh-prefaced, indicating something apparently “touched off” (Jefferson, 1978).

⁷The idiom is drawn from the game of cricket in which an individual batsman's innings can indeed be very long.

⁸Of course, sequences such as introductions and telephone openings, where requesting, or preferably offering, information about identity are fundamental (Pillet-Shore, 2011; Schegloff, 1986) are gateways to all the interaction that can follow and not simply local sequences.