Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge

This article considers the role of grammatical form in the construction of social action, focusing on turns that either assert or request information. It is argued that the epistemic status of a speaker consistently takes precedence over a turn's morphosyntactically displayed epistemic stance in the constitution of the action a turn is implementing. Insofar as asserting or requesting information is a fundamental underlying feature of many classes of social action, consideration of the (relative) epistemic statuses of the speaker and hearer are a fundamental and unavoidable element in the construction of social action. A range of examples illustrate patterns of convergence and divergence in the relation between epistemic status and epistemic stance. Even where an utterance is in the linguistic form of a question, and seems to be doing questioning, the latter will not be adequately accounted for by the former. For if the question form can be used for actions other than questioning, and questioning can be accomplished by linguistic forms other than questions, then a relevant problem can be posed not only about how a question does something other than questioning, but about how it does questioning; not only about how questioning is done by non-question forms, but about how it gets accomplished by question forms. (Schegloff, 1984, pp. 34-35) We could not utter a phrase meaningfully unless we adjusted lexicon and prosody according to what the categoric or individual identity of our putative recipients allows us to assume they already know, and knowing this, don't mind our openly presuming on it. At the very center of interaction life is the cognitive relation we have with those present before us, without which relationship our activity, behavioral and verbal, could not be meaningfully organized. And although this cognitive relationship can be modified during a social contact, and typically is, the relationship itself is extrasituational, consisting of the information a pair of persons have about the information each other has of the world, and the information they have (or haven't) concerning the possession of this information. (Goffman, 1983, pp. 4-5)