Indexing Uncertainty: The Case of Turn-Final Or

Abstract

Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics as the methodology and drawing from naturally occurring American English interaction, this article investigates the practice of ending polar questions with or as in Does that bring up jealousy for you or. This practice is generally considered to be ungrammatical, yet occurs regularly in spoken interaction. This article argues that turn-final or functions as an epistemic downgrade by (a) making possible an unproblematic disconfirmation next, (b) gesturing toward an unverbalized alternative, and (c) being oriented to as a question format that requires an elaboration. By investigating the sequential environment and the interactional work or accomplishes, this study advances our understanding not only of how speakers encode linguistically and use socially turn-final or but also of how linguistic units are adapted for interaction. My work contributes to several major areas of conversation analytic research, mainly grammar in interaction and epistemics. Data are in American English.

I wish to thank Trini Stickle for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to Charles Antaki and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. All remaining errors are mine.

Notes

¹ Names, images and other identifiers have been anonymized in all data excerpts. All data for this study were collected in compliance with the regulations and policies set by the IRB of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Participants consented to take part in this study in writing.

² All data were transcribed according to the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson (Heritage & Atkinson, 1984). Some additional notations represent intonation (based on the Gesprächsanalytische Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2) (Selting et al., 2009). Specifically, I use “?” for rising intonation, “,” for slightly rising intonation, “_” for level intonation, “;” for slightly falling intonation, and “.” for falling intonation. The phenomenon under investigation in this study has been highlighted using an arrow (→) and bold font for “or” in all transcripts of data samples.

³ I thank Cecilia E. Ford for giving me access to her personal data corpus. In addition to my own recordings, data also come from corpora available on talkbank.org, such as CallFriend and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken Interaction, available online through www.talkbank.org (MacWhinney, 2007). The CallHome corpus consists of 120 phone calls lasting up to 30 min. I inspected all publicly available conversations online.

⁴ Following Lindstrom (1997), who includes partial overlaps on eller, I include instances of the following types of overlap: “o[r” and or[:”. This degree of overlap is one type of smooth turn transition and speaker change (Jefferson, 1973, 1983, 1986; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007), and the onset of recipients’ responses occurs when or is projectable via—at least—its initial vowel. Cases with full overlap on or and other, more substantial overlap, have been excluded from the analysis here. This was done because without the or at least being projectable, as analysts, it would be hard to make an argument about participants’ orientation to the or.

⁵ Type-conforming responses are those that include a yes or no (or equivalent tokens). Nonconforming responses do not include a yes or no (Raymond, 2003).

⁶ I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to how the reformulations are implicated in the construction of uncertainty.

⁷ I thank one anonymous reviewer, who—in noting that Albert’s response seems to be a confirmation with a correction in form of a specification—prompted me to address this issue in more detail. A specification of a prior proposition, in essence, is different from a confirmation, as it rejects something as incorrect. While “in the deck” and “at the bottom” seem similar, “in the deck” could mean on top of the cards, shuffling them in, or at the bottom. Only one of these choices is correct, and the option Eric uttered is disconfirmed, albeit in a “yes”-but turn format.

⁸ Biased questions, also called conducive questions, are those questions “where the speaker is predisposed to accept one particular answer as the right one” (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p. 879). Huddleston and Pullum (2002) suggest that negative interrogative questions “are always strongly biased” (p. 883), but—crucially—either toward the negative or positive answer. They propose that it is the context that helps shed light on the type of bias encoded in such questions. For instance, for the question “Didn’t I tell you Kim would be coming?,” the authors suggest that it could be biased toward the negative answer “You didn’t tell me” or toward the positive answer “You did tell me” (for a related line of arguments, see Biber et al. (1999) and Quirk et al. (1985)). This example shows that from a linguistic perspective, polarity and a bias toward either a positive or negative response is not as clear-cut as some CA literature at times suggests. There is a need for further research on the notion of polarity and how polarity plays out in interaction, how it is oriented to as real for interactants and employed for interactional ends (but see Heinemann, 2008; Koshik, 2002a, 2005).