Article published In:
Language and DialogueVol. 10:2 (2020) ► pp.215–240
Demonstrative questions and epistemic authority management in medium-sitter interactions
Some examples from an Italian “public mediumship demonstration”
Although paranormal experiences have been broadly investigated, medium-sitter interactions have been studied much less. In this article, five excerpts from an Italian “public mediumship demonstration” are presented with the main aim to answer the following research questions: (1) what are the linguistic strategies used by the medium to manage her epistemic authority and by the sitters to acknowledge, strengthen, resist or contest it? (2) how do these strategies affect the sequential structure of interaction? The analyses reveal that: the medium mainly uses demonstrative questions; sitters generally confirm what the medium discloses, acknowledging her epistemic authority; when sitters do not confirm, the medium resorts to three main linguistic strategies attempting to (re)establish her authority; when the medium has to manage confirmation failures, the sequential structure becomes more complex.
Keywords: medium-sitter interaction, public mediumship demonstration, epistemic authority, persuasion, KUB theoretical model, certainty, uncertainty, knowledge questions, linguistic strategies for confirmation failures
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Corpus, aims, methods
- 2.1Corpus
- 2.2Aims
- 2.3Method
- KUB Model
- 3.Results
- 3.1Some quantitative data
- 3.2The qualitative analysis
- 3.2.1Confirmative answers
- The acknowledgment of M’s epistemic authority
- The strengthening of M’s epistemic authority
- 3.2.2Confirmative failures
- Reworking questions on the basis of what S has previously said to reduce the likelihood of obtaining another disconfirming answer
- Overlapping and quickly shifting to a related topic to limit the damage
- Self-repair expressions (I explained myself poorly) to ascribe S’s disconfirmation to a linguistic misunderstanding, and adding new questions
- 3.2.1Confirmative answers
- 4.Conclusion and discussion
- Notes
-
References
References
Aphek, Edna and Yishai Tobin
Avtgis, Theodore
1998 “Locus of control and persuasion, social influence, and conformity: A meta-analytic review.” Psychological Reports 83 (3): 899–903. 
Beach, Wayne A.
1993 “Transitional regularities for ‘casual’ “Okay” usages.” Journal of Pragmatics 191: 325–352.
Bongelli, Ramona, Ilaria Riccioni, and Andrzej Zuczkowski
2018a “Epistemic stance negotiation: Some examples from Italian conversations.” Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 1351: 1–14.
2018b “Questions and epistemic stance in Italian conversations.” Ampersand 51: 29–40.
Chauvin, Bruno and Etienne Mullet
2018 “Individual differences in paranormal beliefs: The differential role of personality aspetcs.” Current psychology: 1–10.
Cialdini, Robert B.
1983 Influence. The Psychology of persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.
2004 “The science of persuasion.” Scientific American Mind 14 (1): 70–77.
Delorme, Arnaud, Julie Beishel, Leena Michel, Mark Boccuzzi, Dean Radin and Paul J. Mills
2013 “Electrocortical activity associated with subjective communication with deceased.” Frontiers in Psychology 41: 1–10.
Drinkwater, Kenneth, Andrew Denovan, Neil Dagnall and Andrew Parker
2018 “The Australian Sheep-Goat Scale: An Evaluation of Factor Structure and Convergent Validity.” Frontiers in Psychology 91: 1–14.
Enoksen, Anette Einan and Paul Dickerson
2018 “That proves my point: How mediums reconstrue disconfirmation in medium-sitter interactions.” British Journal of Social Psychology 571: 386–403.
Hayano, Kaoru
2011 “Claiming epistemic primacy: Yo-marked assessments in Japanese.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada and Jakob Steensig, 58–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2014 “Question design in conversation.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, eds. by Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 395–414. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wyley Blackwell.
Heritage, John
2012a “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(1): 1–29.
2012b “The epistemic engine: Sequence organization and territories of knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45(1): 30–52.
Heritage, John and Geoffrey, Raymond G.
2005 “The terms of agreement: Indexing epistemic authority and subordination in talk-in-interaction.” Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (1): 15–38.
Heritage, John
2010 “Questioning in medicine”. In “Why Do You Ask?”: the Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse, ed. by Alice Freed and Susan Ehrlich, 42–68. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Heritage, John and Geoffrey Raymond
2012 “Navigating epistemic landscapes: Acquiescence, agency and resistance in responses to polar questions.” In Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives, ed. by Jan P. de Ruiter, 179–192. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jorgensen, Danny L.
1984 “Divinatory Discourse.” Symbolic Interaction 7 (2): 135–153.
Kamio, Akio
Labov, William and David Fanshel
1977 Therapeutic Discourse, Psychoterapy as Conversation. New York: Academic Press.
Lamont, Peter, Claudia Coelho and Andrew Mckinlay
2009 “Explaining the unexplained: Warranting disbelief in the paranormal.” Discourse Studies 11 (5): 543–559.
Lee, Seung-Hee
2014 “Response design in conversation.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by John Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 415–432. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Levinson, Stephen C.
2014 “Action formation and ascription.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by John Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 103–130. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Linell, Per and Thomas Luckman
1991 “Asymmetries in dialogue: some conceptual preliminaries”. In Asymmetries in Dialogue, ed. by Ivana Marková and Klaus Foppa, 1–20. Hemel Hempsted: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Locke, Terry
2004 Critical Discourse Analysis. New York/London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Milgram, Stanley
1963 “Behavioural study of obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 671: 371–378.
Mondada, Lorenza
2013 “Displaying, contesting and negotiating epistemic authority in social interaction: Descriptions and questions in guided visits.” Discourse Studies 15 (5): 597–626.
Ohashi, Yasushi, Robin Wooffitt, Clare Jackson and Yumi Nixon
2013 “Discourse, culture, and extraordinary experiences: Observations from a comparative, qualitative analysis of Japanese and UK English accounts of paranormal phenomena.” Western Journal of Communication 77(4): 466–488.
Petty, Richard E. and John T. Cacioppo
1984 “The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1): 69–81.
1986 Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Raymond, Geoffrey
2003 “Grammar and social organization: Yes/No interrogatives and the structure of responding.” American Sociological Review 68 (6): 939–967.
Riccioni, Ilaria, Ramona Bongelli, Gill Philip and Andrzej Zuczkowski
2018 “Dubitative questions and epistemic stance.” Lingua, 2071: 71–95.
Schegloff, Emanuel A.
1980 “Preliminaries to preliminaries: “Can I ask you a question?”.” Sociological Inquiry 501: 104–52.
2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. London: Cambridge University Press.
Simmonds-Moore, Christine A.
2016 “An interpretative phenomenological analysis exploring synesthesia as an exceptional experience: Insights for consciousness and cognition.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 13(4): 303–327.
Stivers, Tanya
2005 “Modified repeats: One method for asserting primary rights from second position.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(2): 131–158.
2014 “Sequence organization.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by John Sidnell and Tanya Stivers, 191–209. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig
2011 The morality of knowledge in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stone, Anna
2016 “Rational Thinkink and Belief in Psychic Abilities: It Depends on Level of Involvement.” Psychological Reports 118 (1): 74–89.
Storm, Lance, Ken Drinkwater and Anthony L. Jinks
2017 “A Question on Belief: An Analysis of Item Content in Paranormal Belief Questionnnaires.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 31 (2): 187–230.
Szczyrbak, Magdalena
2018 “Knowing, Unknowing or Believing? Epistemic Stance in Donald Tusk’s Testimony in the Trial on the Polish Air Force Tu-154 Air Crash.” Studies in Polish Linguistics 13 (34): 209–236.
van Dijk, Teun A.
2004 “Critical Discourse Analysis”. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heide Hamilton, 352–371. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wales, Katie
2009 “Unnatural conversation in unnatural conversations: speech reporting in the discourse of spiritual mediumship.” Language and Literature 18 (4): 347–356.
Willett, Thomas
1988 “A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality.” Studies in Language 12 (1): 51–97.
Wood, Wendy
2000 “Attitude change. Persuasion and social influence.” Annual Review of Psychology 511: 539–570.
Wooffitt, Robin
2000 “Some properties of interactional organisation of displays of paranormal cognition in psychic-sitter interaction.” Sociology 34 (3): 457–479.
2001a “Researching psychic practioners: Conversation analysis.” In Discourse as Data. A Guide for Analysis, ed. by Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon J. Yates, 49–92. London: Sage Publications.
2001b “A socially organized basis for displays of cognition: Procedural orientation to evidential turns in psychic-sitter interaction.” British Journal of Social Psychology 401: 545–563.
2006 The language of mediums and psychics. Burlington, USA: Ashgate.
2007 “Epistemic authority and neutrality in the discourse of psychic practitioners: Toward a naturalistic parapsychology.” Journal of Parapsychology 71 (1/2): 69–104.
Wooffitt, Robin, Nicola Holt and Simone Allistone
2010 “Introspection as institutional practice: Reflections on the attempt to capture conscious experience in a parapsychology experiment.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 7(1): 5–20.
Wooffitt, Robin, Clare Jackson, Darren Reed, Yasushi Ohashi and Isaac Hughes
2013 “Self-identity, authenticity and the other: The spirits and audience management in stage mediumship.” Language and Communication 331: 93–105.
Zuczkowski, Andrzej, Ramona Bongelli, and Ilaria Riccioni
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Bongelli, Ramona, Ilaria Riccioni, Alessandra Fermani & Gill Philip
2020. Hypothetical questions in everyday Italian conversations.. Lingua 246 ► pp. 102951 ff. 
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.