“Do you know banana boat?”: Occasioning overt knowledge negotiations in Japanese EFL conversation

Abstract

This paper adds to a growing body of conversation analytic (CA) research that seeks to explicate how knowledge is negotiated in talk-in-interaction. It does so by documenting the specific interactional practices novice Japanese EFL learners use to claim, demonstrate, and monitor knowledge during conversation. Of particular note is one practice that speakers use to determine the extent of their recipient's epistemic access: “Do you know?” (DYK) formulations. DYK formulations are found to occur in a consistent sequential environment of initial reference sequences and to have regularly patterned, highly organized sequential trajectories. I show how both speakers and recipients display orientations to normative preferences regarding knowledge access and how knowledge check questions like DYK serve the larger role of maintaining intersubjectivity, epistemic congruence and managing topics. In particular, I argue that although morpho-syntactically “do you know?” constitutes a polar interrogative of Y/N access, sequentially it serves as a means of constraining the next relevant action to an overt claim of access or non-access that drives the ongoing interaction toward the public instantiation of intersubjectivity.