Chapter 5. Three practices for confirming inferences in French talk-in-interaction

Abstract

Three practices for doing confirmation in French are investigated (repetition, the particle voilà and the adverb/adjective exact(ement)) as responses to inferences, i.e., requests for confirmation that display some understanding of prior talk. While broadly restricted to the context of inferences, at a level of finer action-sequential granularity the paper looks in turn at responses to four different types of inference-making confirmation-seeking first pair parts. The analyses show how each confirmation practice does slightly different work depending on the type of initiating action, while some commonalities also hold for each confirmation practice across inference-types. Through repetitional confirmation, confirmers claim authorship over what is inferred. With voilà-confirmations, confirmers attribute some epistemic agency to the interlocutor with respect to the forming of the confirmable understanding. By confirming with exact(ement), confirmers treat the inference-producer as having reached the proffered understanding even more independently. The findings reveal both more context-free and more context-sensitive aspects of the work done by the response forms.