This chapter examines three particles that have epistemic functions in English and Mandarin: turn-initial ‘oh’ in English, turn-initial ‘ou’ in Mandarin, and turn-final ‘a’ in Mandarin. It is argued that while ou and oh converge in registering a ‘change of state’ of information, orientation or awareness, turn-final a is used to register a contrast between oneself and an interlocutor, which often implicates, and reflexively embodies, the speaker’s pre-existing knowledge, perspective, expectation or experience in relation to the matter at issue. This “contrast-invoking” usage of turn-final ‘a’ can be mobilized to problematize the action of the previous speaker by marking it as counter to the speaker’s expectation, thus converging with oh-prefacing in this particular interactional usage despite their normal functional divide. The chapter ends with a consideration of putatively universal pragmatic needs that are carried out using distinctive resources, and a distinctive division of labor among resources, in the two languages.
Chao, Yuan-ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Clayman, Steven, and John Heritage. 2002. The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul. 1992. “Contested Evidence in a Courtroom Cross-Examination: The Case of a Trial for Rape.” In Talk at Work: Social Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew and John Heritage, 470–520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2016. “Polar Questions.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, ed. by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath, Chapter 116. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Available online at [URL]. Accessed on 2016-03-08.
Fox, Barbara A., and Sandra A. Thompson. 2010. “Responses to Wh-Questions in English Conversation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43: 133–156.
Goffman, Erving. 1978. “Response Cries.” Language 54: 787–815.
Heinemann, Trine, and Aino Koivisto (eds). 2016. “Indicating a Change-of-State in Interaction: Cross-linguistic Perspectives.” Journal of explorations 104: 83–88.
Heritage, John. 1984. “A Change-of-State Token and Aspects of Its Sequential Placement.” In Structures of Social Action, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 299–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John. 1998. “Oh-Prefaced Responses to Inquiry.” Language in Society 27 (3): 291–334.
Heritage, John. 2002. “Oh-Prefaced Responses to Assessments: A Method of Modifying Agreement/Disagreement.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, and Sandra Thompson, 196–224. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heritage, John. 2012. "Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge."Research on Language and Social Interaction 45: 1–25.
Heritage, John, and Geoffrey Raymond. 2005. “The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Assessment Sequences.” Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (1): 15–38.
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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, John, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds). frth. Turn-Initial Particles across Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jefferson, Gail. 1978. “Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 219–248. New York: Academic Press.
Kim, Hye Ri Stephanie, and Satomi Kuroshima (eds). 2013. “Turn Beginnings in Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 57: 267–337.
Li, Charles, and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Lü, Shuxiang, and Dexi Zhu. 1953. Yufa Xiuci Jianghua [Talks on Grammar and Rhetorics]. Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian.
Raymond, Geoffrey. 2003. “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68: 939–967.
Raymond, Geoffrey, and John Heritage. 2006. “The Epistemics of Social Relations: Owning Grandchildren.” Language in Society 35: 677–705.
Sacks, Harvey. 1987. “On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organization, ed. by Graham Button and John R. E. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1984. “On Some Questions and Ambiguities in Conversation.” In Structures of Social Action, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 28–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. “Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action.” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1): 161–216.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1997. “Practices and Actions: Boundary Cases of Other-Initiated Repair.” Discourse Processes 23 (3): 499–545.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2004. “On Dispensability.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37: 95–149.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2006. “Interaction: The Infrastructure for Social Institutions, the Natural Ecological Niche for Language and the Arena in Which Culture Is Enacted.” In The Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, ed. by Nicholas J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson, 70–96. New York: Berg.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, Volume 1. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2009. “One Perspective on Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives.” In Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Jack Sidnell, 357–406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, Tanya. 2010. “An Overview of the Question-Response System in American English.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2772–2781.
Stivers, Tanya. 2011. “Morality and Question Design: 'Of Course' as Contesting a Presupposition of Askability.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig, 82–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, Tanya, Nicholas J. Enfield, Penelope Brown, Christina Englert, Makoto Hayashi, Trine Heinemann, Gertie Hoymann, Federico Rossano, Jan Peter De Ruiter, Kyung-Eun Yoon, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. “Universals and Cultural Variation in Turn-Taking in Conversation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (26): 10587–10592.
Stivers, Tanya, and Makoto Hayashi. 2010. “Transformative Answers: One Way to Resist a Question’s Constraints.” Language in Society 39: 1–25.
Terasaki, Alene K. 2004. “Pre-Announcement Sequences in Conversation.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene Lerner, 171–223. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wu, Ruey-Jiuan R. 2006. “Initiating Repair and Beyond: The Use of Two Repeat-formatted Repair Initiations in Mandarin Conversation.” Discourse Processes 4: 67–109.
Wu, Ruey-Jiuan R. 2009. “Repetition in the Initiation of Repair.” In Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Jack Sidnell, 31–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2021. Proficiency and Preference Organization in Second Language Mandarin Chinese Refusals. The Modern Language Journal 105:4 ► pp. 897 ff.
Persson, Rasmus
2020. Taking Issue with a Question While Answering It: Prefatory Particles and Multiple Sayings of Polar Response Tokens in French. Research on Language and Social Interaction 53:3 ► pp. 380 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 october 2024. 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.