Indexing Priority of Position: Eben as Response Particle in German

ABSTRACT

Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (“exactly”). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the “confirmable”) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B’s confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the “anchor”). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure “anchor-confirmable-eben” that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.

Notes

¹ This extract will be analyzed in a later section as Extract 7.

² A cross-linguistic comparison would be necessary to identify functional equivalent(s) in English. A candidate would be English exactly (possibly a specific prosodic realization with strong prominence on the second vowel), but since there is not yet enough research for such a comparison, we refrain from translating eben.

³ Double parentheses in the translation are used for words that need to be added to make the translation more idiomatic, e.g., objects of a transitive verb or subject pronouns. Single parentheses are used for uncertain hearings and also for approximations of difficult-to-transfer elements, such as modal particles.

⁴ German also has an adjective (“even,” “smooth”), temporal adverb (“just now”), and modal particle eben. The particle is described as indexing “‘recourse’ to facts mentioned before or assumed to be known to the hearers” (Lütten, 1979, p. 30) and thus as essentially backward-looking, reflecting an etymological connection to the semantics of the temporal adverb. Moreover, the modal particle is said to convey unquestionable facts in assertions, thus (re)establishing consensus (Lütten, 1979, p. 33). Zifonun, Hoffmann, and Strecker (1997, p. 1231) note that it regularly marks assertions as consequences of previous talk, particularly in suggestions or advice giving. Our analysis will show that the response and modal particle thus share some semantic-pragmatic features: Both indicate consensus while highlighting something as not new.

⁵ On response particles that can be used for confirmation in English, see Barnes (2011, 2012); Gardner (2007); Heritage (1984, 2016); on German, see Barth-Weingarten (2011); Betz (2015); Golato and Fagyal (2008); Oloff (2017).

⁶ Cf. “confirmable turn” by Barnes (2012). Note that we are using “confirmable” as an action-based and essentially retrospective category. It is a turn that was treated by recipients as confirmable.

⁷ But see Küttner (2016), who proposes a somewhat narrower definition of what should be understood as “confirmable”: propositions that “the recipient (the would-be confirmer) has, or can legitimately claim, epistemic supremacy relative to the other participant … over the issue at hand” (p. 54).

⁸ For related work on American English right, Australian English that’s right, and partial confirmatory repeats, see Barnes (2012), Gardner (2007), Küttner (2016), and Stivers (2005).

⁹ This corpus FOLK 2.8 comprises, as of May 2017, 279 hours of informal, institutional, and public interaction (259 recorded interactions, 1.95 million word tokens).

¹⁰ See https://franz.unibas.ch/fileadmin/franz/user_upload/redaktion/Mondada_conv_multimodality.pdf.

¹¹ The total number of eben in FOLK 2.8 is 2,298, comprising 1,917 occurrences as modal particles, 290 response particles (12.6%), 80 temporal adverbs, two attributive, and 0 predicative adjectives. Numbers are based on manually checked, automatic POS searches.

¹² Kirsten’s ja genau responds to line 06, which is a request to confirm a fact in her domain. It confirms (a) the fact that Kirsten has exams coming up and (b) its relevance for the argument Kirsten is building. Kirsten thus confirms Rita’s understanding and aligns with the epistemic positioning put forward.

¹³ We adopt the term from Heritage and Raymond (2005), who discuss “priority” in assessment sequences as central to negotiating “who is agreeing with whom” (Heritage, 2013, p. 383): “[B]eing the first to offer an assessment of some state of affairs carries an implicit claim of epistemic priority” (Heritage, 2013, p. 380). Both first and responding speakers can push back against the epistemic implications of sequential position. Epistemic priority and superiority are two facets of epistemic primacy and connected to authority (Hayano, 2013, p. 21). We use “priority” in a strictly temporal sense, as claiming to have conveyed knowledge/a position before. In the contexts in which eben is used, (temporal) priority may or may not be connected to matters of superiority for interactants. We thus separate the two concepts and use “priority” in a narrower sense.

¹⁴ We adopt the term from Schwarz-Friesel (2007), who uses it in their analysis of “indirect anaphora.” Like the turns confirmed by eben, indirect anaphora do not have coreferential antecedents but connect back to a prior item or stretch of discourse that is only inferentially related to the anaphoric expression (e.g., by meronymy).

¹⁵ We speak broadly of eben indexing “a position” rather than “knowledge.” Eben typically reindexes a formulation of evaluative or argumentative stance, which could not aptly be termed “knowledge.”

¹⁶ For ease of reading, we explicitly mark the components “anchor” (A), “confirmable” (C), and “eben turn” (E) in all remaining transcripts and use them to structure our analyses. It should be kept in mind, however, that the anchor is not a sequentially first position; it only becomes salient with the use of eben.

¹⁷ Wright (2011) shows that clicks demarcate the onset of new and disjunctive sequences in English. On the affective work of clicks after complaints in English, see Reber (2012).

¹⁸ Shared knowledge is also implicitly ascribed by the modal particle ja (lines 01–02), which indexes common ground and evidence (Reineke, 2016).

¹⁹ The remaining 19 examples are discussed in section “Summary and discussion”.

²⁰ Extract 6, line 54 may look like a counterexample. This repetition, however, does not display a prior stance. Instead, it appreciates the wordplay by homophony in the prior speaker’s turn (späth, line 50, spät, line 51) (cf. Golato, Betz, Taleghani-Nikazm, & Drake, 2017 on assessment repeats in German).

²¹ We apply Sacks’s conceptual distinction between demonstrating and claiming understanding to our analysis of claiming versus demonstrating an independent stance.

²² We coded 25 examples as clearly having this criticizing dimension. The analysis of this aspect of eben is difficult, since it is not eben itself but rather other interactional features (prosody, commentary following eben, as in Extract 3) that make this dimension visible and thus accessible to analysis.