Positioning Oneself Through Epistemic Assertion Sequences: A Time-Aligned Corpus Analysis of BELF Small Talk

Abstract

Epistemics in interaction focuses on ‘knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest and defend in and through turns-at-talk’ (Heritage in The handbook of conversation analysis, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Chichester, 370–394, 2013), examining ‘how participants display, manage and orient to their own and others’ state of knowledge’ (Jakonen and Morton in Appl Linguist 36(1):72–94, 2015). This study investigates discursive practices of asserting knowledge of others in Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) small talk at casual office lunch meetings in an Asian country in relation to the relativity of self and other among the participants. Three research questions are addressed: (1) how do the participants allocate their speaking time amongst themselves? (2) what topics are discussed? and (3) who asserts knowledge of whom, and in what way? The data is analysed in reference to the concept of epistemic assertion, which I introduce here on the basis of the two concepts: fishing devices in Pomerantz (Sociol Inq 50:186–198, 1980) and vicarious narratives in Norrick (Lang Soc 42(4):385–406, 2013). The former is a strategy with which a speaker accesses a recipient’s knowledge by reporting what the speaker knows, while, the latter is narratives of others’ experiences, which are different from personal narratives. The results are discussed in relation to the shift in knowledge status (cf. Labov and Fanshel in Therapeutic discourse: psychotherapy as conversation, Academic Press, Orland, 1977) and the relativity of self and other in a global workplace (cf. Doherty in Pedagogy Cult Soc 16(3):269–288, 2008). In the fluid BELF interaction without any rigid relationship between self and other, the participants seemed to posit themselves as knowers of Other through the practices of epistemic assertion, simultaneously, expressing relative and reflected Self in situ.