Indexing Priority of Position: Eben as Response Particle in German

Response particles manage intersubjectivity. This conversation analytic study describes German eben (exactly). With eben, speaker A locally agrees with the immediately prior turn of B (the confirmable) and establishes a second indexical link: A relates B's confirmable to a position A herself had already displayed (the anchor). Through claiming temporal priority, eben speakers treat a just-formulated position as self-evident and mark independence. Further evidence for the three-part structure anchor-confirmable-eben that eben sets in motion retrospectively comes from instances where eben speakers supply a missing/opaque anchor via a postpositioned display of independent access. Data are in German with English translation.