Remediation of infelicitous epistemic stance

Abstract

Conversational interaction occurs against a layered backdrop of what speakers know in common and what they do not. Expectations of others' knowledge permeate every utterance and are flavored by social considerations of both rights-to and responsibilities-for knowledge in various domains. Speakers adopt an epistemic stance in turns-at-talk through the use of linguistic and interactional resources, and coparticipants hold normative expectations that the assumed stance is a felicitous expression of the speaker's underlying epistemic status. Yet, this norm is sometimes violated. This paper examines cases where conversational participants orient to a mismatch between an inappropriately high epistemic stance and a lower underlying epistemic status and engage in repair or remediation to address this inconsistency. In some cases, participants reformulate their stance in a single turn at talk. In other cases, they are opaquely prompted to lower their epistemic stance and the responsive reformulation has many markers of dispreference, suggesting that epistemic stance lowering is a problematic action for participants. Remediation of epistemic stance is even, on occasion, the topic of narratives, a testament to the salience of such exchanges. We argue that features of these sequences both orient-to and reinforce the expected norm of epistemic felicity.